The Tenth One

So after about two months and ten blog entries (counting this one), we take a moment to quickly survey how things have improved for this intrepidly procrastinating author.

I started writing this blog when very down and depressed due to a lack of income caused by my not being employed. The night I wrote the first entry I had just sent about twenty emails to various employers on craigslist and felt pretty desperate. Imagine my surprise when the next day or so I heard back from one of them and eventually went on to work for the window cleaning company I'm at now. This development has improved my money situation significantly, although I'm still playing a pretty desperate game of catch-up with my bills and money owed to friends and family who loaned me money during my long stretch of joblessness.

The unfortunate side effect of this job is a lack of time for writing the things I want to be writing. You'll notice there has been a real slowdown in blog entries from this last month, that's because I'm working an average of eleven hours or so a day and that's six days a week. It makes writing even this thing pretty difficult, but I think I've already touched on that in an earlier blog entry.

As for the series of stories I started writing this blog to procrastinate from writing, well, that too has slowed down considerably. This development is the most depressing one that has come from my job. I find myself looking over the stories I've already competed instead of working on the current one, picking out countless flaws and grammatical errors. I'm able to fix the grammar, correct the syntax, but the underlying flaws--the bad writing--I can't help but agonize over. The stories all look so bad to me, and I have no way to see them objectively. I find it harder and harder to make myself write them, the more I procrastinate the more I start thinking that the ideas I have are stupid, and that even if they are okay that no one will ever read and enjoy them.

It's all very disheartening.

Still, I don't want to stop. I think that is the important thing. Parts of me see the stories I write and think "yeah this is shit--Twilight is better written than this crap," but another part of me still feels that urge to keep writing. So I suppose as long as I feel that urge to write I'll keep doing it.

Or writing here to procrastinate anyway.

I feel that last line would be a good place to stop the entry, that sort of fancy, thought-provoking stinger I'm so fond of, but I don't feel like being too thought provoking right now. I'm just using this entry as a sort of "state of the union" thing for all my hordes of loyal readers.

So the state is that I am working a lot more, and don't need a blog as much as I used to in order to procrastinate effectively, but I still enjoy writing the blog and writing my fiction, and so I will endeavor to continue to do both. I've heard from one person that I don't have sex with that my blog was entertaining so I suppose that's enough to keep me typing it for at least another month before I get bored and stop.

As for the collection of stories--which are tentatively subtitled Bookhunter--I plan to continue writing those as well. Perhaps I'll be able to tie those two things together a bit more as I move forward, this blog might provide at least a sense of urgency even if not providing any actual urgency about the schedule of writing I'm taking on.

So let me try to lay it out. My plan is to have the current short story I'm working on in the bank by Christmas. With that done I'll have one more story left to write before editing and proofing can start on my entire collection of seven shorts which will hopefully weigh in at about two hundred pages--which I think is a pretty respectable collection for my first venture into attempting to actually make money off of. If that sells anything at all then I'll be able to start cranking out another collection and hopefully have two or three "books" available for purchase by August of next year.

It's also very possible I'll just sit here and watch those deadlines fly by and continue to never ever get anything actually done in my life while complaining about it on the internet.

But that would be no fun, so let's not do that, okay?

(See? still had a stinger)

The Hardest Hue to Hold

On Tuesday I had a job cleaning the windows of a cardiologist's office. It was a nice office, near a large hospital and several other offices and other medical buildings. It was a one story building so I didn't need to use a pole or ladders or repel or anything. I worked alone that day and actually figured I would be able to enjoy myself, cleaning windows effectively and listening to the Comic Vine podcast.

This being a cardiologist's office, you can imagine that most of the people there were older, men and women who were starting to have real troubles with their hearts, which is pretty much the death knell for people living in the United States these days. I don't say that lightly, I had heart surgery when I was eighteen to fix a problem that would probably have killed me when I was in my 40's. Whether or not the problem was fixed in time or not I suppose I'll know in about 20 years or so.

Anyway, I got started cleaning the windows of this place. The front entrance was the most window-y, with huge glass sections turning the walls around the front door into giant windows. I started there, working from the right to the left side of the building, listening to people talk about comic books, watching the soapy water stream down the glass, just enjoying work as much as anyone can enjoy a job that requires little thought, physical exertion, and has no relation to the things one is passionate about in life.

As I approached the second to last set of the front windows, I noticed a man sitting on the other side of those windows watching me.

He was an old man, his hair had gone well past gray and into white, sweeping back from his skull in desperate strands just a bit too long. He had a sagging face, lined and creased. He was wearing a jacket in spite of the warm afternoon sun and had khaki pants on--but what I remember the most about him were his eyes.

He had blue eyes, faded like old blue jeans and watery, a sort of sheen glinted from them when he twitched them to follow my movements. And they were so, so sad. At first I thought I had just seen him glancing at me as people do, but as I worked closer to where he was I realized he was watching me intently. His sad old eyes would flicker along the arc of my arm as I slid my brush or squeegee along the glass, would look down as I pulled out a towel to wipe up any excess water. He followed my every movement with a longing and sorrow that I could feel through the transparent barrier that separated us.

He never looked at my face, just my hands, my arms, my movements.

I wondered then, and wonder now.

What was he seeing?

Ruminations of a (Beginner) Window Washer

I've been working for a new company over the last few weeks. I won't say the actual name of the company or the people involved, but I am going to talk about it for a bit here because it's my blog and I can talk about whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do to stop me except for stop reading this blog right now which you might do but I'd rather you didn't.

So my new job involves me cleaning windows. 

I've thought about writing this blog a few times since I started the job, but have been too tired or lazy to get it done (the Halloween event for Guild Wars 2 and the release of Assassin's Creed 3 didn't make it any easier), but I have now committed to writing about my brief experiences as a window cleaner.

The company I work for cleans many kinds of windows. At first I thought we only did high rise stuff. We do, but that's not all (there's not a ton of sky-scrapers in Baton Rouge anyway,) we also do smaller businesses and a lot of residential stuff.

More on that later.

First of all, allow me to describe the two guys I've worked with so far in this new profession. Note that the entire company is made up for just five people, counting both myself and the owner, who cleans windows himself as well.

The owner, let's call him Mounds, is a tall, slight man in his fifties. He has a low, sort of mumbling voice and a badly dinged up truck. He's also very scatterbrained, it took him over two weeks to actually get me working after he told me he wanted me to work for him. I discovered literally today that he also plays classical guitar and has a side job playing that instrument at things like weddings. He also seems to be some flavor of Christian, although not Catholic, and devout enough to go on missions to places in Africa. Make of that what you will.

While I didn't work with Mounds when I first started, I've spent most of this week and a day or two of last week working with him on a lot of residential work. It seems he's the one doing the residential stuff for now, until he can find some replacement to take over the work for him. He's a good teacher, and a nice enough guy. He often puts me in the awkward position of having to ask him to repeat himself many times because he speaks so quietly, and can be somewhat passive aggressive about certain areas of my window cleaning that may not be up to snuff, but generally he's not too bad to work with.

The other guy whom I have worked with, and 25% of the company before I started, is a guy I'll call Paul. He's a short, stocky man in his late 30's with an impressive beard. He, I have learned, is an amature masked wrestler in his free time and drives all around the state on the weekends with a whole persona, mask, and music to wow fans of underground wrestling and demonstrate his martial prowess. I didn't believe him at first, but he's got tons of pictures and has shown me his wrestling gear.

It smelled of man.

Paul is a veteran of window washing, with over twenty-five years of experience wiping dirt off of glass and he has taught me the basics of the job in an admirable way.

For all the incredibly weird stuff these two dudes do, they both seem decent and kind and I don't really have any problems with them (aside from Paul's seeming racism, but that's another blog.)

So the job. Yeah. We do climb up some pretty high buildings, tie ropes to rickety metal structures held down with heavy weights and then jump off of the building to repel down the sides of the building and clean it. Those jobs are, so far, my favorite, because you're spending time up high above the stuff on the ground with nothing but you and the window (or side of the building, because we've done pressure washing too, although I didn't do that personally.) The biggest problem is sunburn, especially on the building we were working on last week, which had a highly reflective white roof. The sun beats down mercilessly on big buildings like that with very sparse shade to hide you from its cancerous rays.

I've developed a farmer's tan with alarming speed, and started wearing a baseball cap.

Soon I figure I'll be voting Republican and drinking Coors.

Other than the high-rise stuff we also do smaller businesses. Today I cleaned a small art gallery in Baton Rouge (I didn't even know they had art galleries here) that was just sort of built into a strip mall. Those sorts of jobs are fine because there's usually not too many windows and the ones they do have are usually large and without many panes. The art gallery was particularly awesome because it was all like ten foot wide windows with no frames at all.

Then there's the residential jobs.

Those kind of suck.

But they're also kind of awesome.

They suck because of a few reasons. The primary reason is because most of the houses we do have a lot of windows, and they're usually pretty small, pretty segmented  and pretty dirty. Especially on the outside. The next time you're strolling around your house go take a close look at the corners of the exteriors of your windows.

Know what you'll see?

Fucking spiders.

I don't know why, but spiders fucking love nesting in the corners of residential houses, especially the kinds of houses we seem to do, which is to say houses owned by rich old white people with lots of plants that grow right up against the glass and give them happy little spider bridges to come and go whenever they want.

The houses are, as I said earlier, also owned by very wealthy people and so are very large, fancy houses. This is bad because it makes me angry and depressed, knowing I'll never get to live somewhere as nice as the houses I'm seeing.

One weird trend I'm noticing with these houses, though, is that these rich people have surprisingly small TVs, shitty computers, and lots of VHS tapes. I don't know if that's just because they're older or because when you're rich you have better things to do with your time than sit on the couch and watch TV or play videogames.

It's probably the latter.

Also most of these residential jobs involve both cleaning inside as well as the outside of the house. Entirely separate from the angry jealousy I feel being inside of the house is the pain of having to awkwardly walk around a house, moving furniture, squeaking squeegees around and hunting for missed windows while the owners of the said house are reading or cooking or whatever.

The jobs are kind of awesome for only two reasons, but one of them is pretty awesome.

The lesser of the two is that when you're cleaning interiors of houses you at least get the benefit of air conditioning and shelter from the remorseless sun.

The greater one is sometimes the people will tip.

And they tip big.

Just yesterday I got $40 for cleaning a woman's windows, and she, like most of the other residential customers, was very polite the whole time Paul and I were there, giving us water and telling us we were doing a good job and all that. The $40 though, that was pretty awesome. Paul told me I could make $100 or more just from working a few residential jobs in a day with some luck, so it pretty much makes up for all the headaches of prowling around fancy houses with a dripping brush.

The job is not hard, but it can be tough. The physical toll on my body is high, mostly because I'm a saggy, paunchy 26 year old who hasn't been remotely in shape since he was 20, and long hours and weeks kind of blow (I'm going to be working 14 days straight over the course of this and next week,) but the pay is good and the job itself isn't hard to accomplish and, most importantly, I hardly have to talk to customers or teenage assholes at all.

I do worry about how it will impact my writing. I've hardly written anything since starting. When I get home I'm so tired that I just want to sit around and read or play a game for a few hours before sleeping, but I'm hoping that as my body starts to shape up I'll have more energy for writing and other fun things.

And I can at least write shitty blog entries to keep me sharp until then.

Heroics

I think that the idea of a hero is an important one for people to have. My whole life--as long as I can remember anyway--I have been enamored with the idea of a "hero" as a person someone can respect, look up to throughout life.

I'm not talking about the "every day" heroes of real life. I recognize the sacrifice and bravery of the single mom working to make ends meet so her kids never realize the delicate thread their lives hang on--the daily struggle that a cancer patient goes through every day to continue living, the millions of people who wear smiles to cover their misery and pain every day. These people are brave, heroic even, and should be admired and supported.

But when I talk about heroes these aren't the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Hero. With the capital "H". I don't know if these sorts of heroes really actually exist in the real world. They probably couldn't.

The real world is a messy place, it's full of questions and doubts and people asking about what's right and what's wrong. That's not the sort of world that heroes like this can survive in, because people would doubt that they were doing, would say that they were wrong to do what they did. Our world is a world where Rikki-Tikki-Tavi would be criticized (rightly so) for murdering unborn babies.

BUT THE BABIES ARE EVIL SNAKES!

That's the sort of world that you need for heroes, the ones I want, to exist in. You need a world where you can point at a person and say "This is evil, this needs to be stopped." And the stop it. You don't have to stop it with force or strength or violence, but you stand up to it, resist it. A hero in this sense, in that perfect world of fiction, is the guy who does the resisting, who stops that evil and saves the good people of the world.

The allure of being that hero resonates with incredible strength to me. I don't know why, for sure. Maybe it's the simplicity of it, the fact that you can know, for sure, that you're the good guy, the guy trying to protect and save people and that the ones you're fighting are the bad ones. I hear words about protecting people, about being heroic, I get a total rush.

Maybe my fascination with heroics is immature. I know that I've certainly told myself that many times. I'm not a fool, I know that the real world is no place for these sorts of black and white stories. I realize that the people who still think in this kind of way in the real world are probably the really bad ones, who'd dismiss all of some group or organization as "evil" and want to just kill all of them without understanding why they do the things they do.

I know all of this, but I still feel the pull of heroics, every damn day.

And I don't think that's such a bad thing. Shouldn't we have stories about people who can do truly amazing things, who can fight for what they believe in and win and defeat forces of evil? I think so. I think that we all want to see the good guys win, and I think it helps us all much more than it harms us to have the concept of a hero to look up to, to want to emulate, even when we know that a person like that could never exist in the real world.

I often feel ashamed of my infatuation with the idea of being a hero. I'm not sure why. I suppose it's because I realize what an immature and foolish idea it is. It's why people hate on Superman but love Batman, why everyone wants to be Wolverine instead of Cyclops. It's why the Romans dug Achilles so much more than Odysseus.

But I think there is a place for this mythical hero, even in our modern days of cynicism and jaded sensibilities. I think that having a person who can show us that we can fight back against the bad, whether that's through physical combat or just believing in yourself is a good thing. The world is a cruel and dark place, even nature itself is concerned with nothing more than pure, simple survival. The only good that we have in the whole universe is the good that we create--and the same can be said of evil, of course.

So why not embrace the unabashed heroes of our fiction? Should we not encourage people to follow their examples? I think we should.

I think the reason that I've spent so much of my life playing video games and, especially, role playing games, is because they allow me to portray that sort of fictional hero that could never exist in the world we live in. I always choose the good options in games that allow me to, and I've never really felt the urge to play an "evil party" in Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder or whatever. I get a genuine thrill from reading about or pretending to be a hero.

I think often in fiction these days people will try to subvert or deconstruct the classical hero of fiction. I think there's nothing wrong with that, but I also think people have gone overboard with it. In this (post?)post-modern world we live in people are deconstructing their subversive deconstructions of heroes and fiction. No one seems to want to have just the heroes of old anymore, they're not "edgy" enough, not "real" enough. I'd argue that people don't always read fiction for the hard hitting reality they so many people want to push (or for sex and vampires or whatever else. Sex paired with something is certain to sell, unfortunately.)

And, like I said earlier, stories about heroes don't have to be simple mind floss. Even things like Avatar can show us heroes being heroic while also teaching lessons we all should know and remember.

So don't be jaded, don't be a cynic. Don't say there are no more heroes any more.

We can all be heroes.

We just have to try.

Bump in the Night

So there's this game out right now that I've been playing called X-Com: Enemy Unknown. I've been playing it more than I really should, like putting off writing either my fiction or this blog or anything else that would make me feel better about myself if I did it.

It's a good game, though, pretty different than the standard games being released these days and I hope that it can start the ball rolling on the gaming industry at least moving a bit away from Modern Warfare clones.

However, I don't really want to talk about the state of the video game industry here, or even too much about the game X-Com. Just hang on, I'll get to the point eventually. I just need to get some details out of the way first.

So in X-Com you're the commander of a secret organization called "X-Com" (shocker.) You spend your time alternating between decided what sort of research and development to undertake in your base and then commanding a squad of soldiers to fight against aliens on the ground.

The ground fighting is the part of the game that takes up most of your time and it's the part the we need to focus on for this entry.

The game is surprisingly tense, scary even. The soldiers you control are pretty vulnerable and can be taken out in one or two unlucky shots. Combine that with the slow pacing of searching for unseen aliens, sometimes just hearing them scuttle around the outskirts of your visual range, and by the end of the harder missions your nerves will be pretty frayed.

Now, when I was a child--and really still even know--aliens were my particular boogieman. Some people are afraid of ghosts or demons or zombies. Some people are afraid of serial killers or cancer (much more reasonable fears) but I have always been scared of aliens.

I know aliens aren't abducting people--don't think that I consider this a rational fear. Fear is rarely rational at all.

As a child, probably from ten or eleven up until seventeen or so, I did think aliens really were coming to Earth and snatching people up from their homes in the night. You have to realize that this was right in the middle of the X-Files decade and before the Internet was really around to allow a young kind unlimited resources with which to research the idea of UFOs flying around in the night, striking people with beams of light and taking them away for all sorts of horrific shit. My sources for understanding aliens and how they interacted with the people of the planet were limited to movies like that, the X-Files, book with titles like UFO Encounters and late night specials on the Discovery Channel (this was back when Discovery seemed like a pretty reputable source and only played their crazy alien shit late at night when most people didn't see it.)

I realize that these days the idea of being actually afraid of an alien is somewhat laughable. Even in the 90s when aliens were more like zombies in terms of popularity people treated them, in general, as more like a joke than a threat. People sold stuffed  "grays" and wore t-shirts with UFOs on them. 

But to me, in those younger years and even to a degree today, aliens were never a cute thing, or a joke or something. I would read the accounts of people who claimed to have been abducted and feel chills. Even now when I listen to that stuff I get freaked out. Even though I know it didn't really happen, even though I know there aren't aliens creeping around my door or looking through the windows of my house.

Just imagine. Try not to let your popular concepts of aliens interfere with your perception of it. Imagine lying in bed at night, imagine awakening and seeing the bedroom door ajar with something that is not a man standing in it--someone tall and impossibly thin, looking at you with flat, doll-dead eyes. Really stop and think about that realization, that you are not alone in the house, and that the thing standing in the doorway, looking down at you is seeing you, knowing where you are.

Don't look away from the screen, don't look behind you.

Imagine the thing moving towards you, imagine not being able to move, even to scream. Imagine that flat, emotionless face looming over you, inhumanly long hands wrapping around your mouth and pulling you from the bed. 

Imagine how the skin on your neck would prickle up if that thing was in the house now, moving around, watching you from behind, staring through a window. Looking at you the way you might look at an animal in a zoo.

That's fucking scary, isn't it?

Even now I still can get pretty freaked out by alien movies as an adult. I still sometimes have nightmares about them getting into the house. Hell, I even really liked the movie Signs just because the aliens scared the shit out of me.

I think most people have a thing like my aliens, something, either a monster or a type of person (or a specific person) or even a concept or thing that they get scared of just even when they know there's nothing to be afraid of.

I've always been interested in fear, of the feeling of being afraid. When I was young I'd seek out the alien stuff just to give myself those tingles. I devoured Stephen King books, Lovecraft books, even old issues of Creepy and Eerie that my older cousin had lying around. When I realized I wanted to write things my first thought was to write scary stories. I've moved away from wanting to be the next Stephen King (that is a lie. I'd love to be as successful as him--I'd be happy to be half as successful as Dean Koontz) but the idea of writing scary stories still fascinates me.

I often wonder why people enjoy the ghost story so much. Because that's what the aliens, the demons, the zombies and the vampires are in the end--just ghost stories, people gathering around and saying "this is real, something evil is out there, be afraid of it." I think maybe it's a kind of survival mechanism originating from the caveman days--stay near the group, fear what is different, here there be dragons. A way to keep people in the tribe or whatever close to home and away from all the incredible dangers of our ancestor's world.

I mean, prehistoric man actually did have monsters to fight. Not imaginary ones. Things like smilodon are scary no matter how advanced you might be. So maybe our fear, even our enjoyment of fear, has evolved from the times where we needed fear to survive. Maybe the thrill of fear even came around as a way for us to seek out things to fear so we might better survive them when they came seeking us.

Either way. Aliens.

They're scary.

Scientific Literature

I enjoy learning things. Anything at all. My girlfriend has recently been on a baking kick, everything from sandwich bread to pecan pies. I've enjoyed her experimentation in baking because it means I get to eat lots of tasty and (according to her) healthy breads, but I've also enjoyed asking her about what she's learned from delving into the science and art of bakery. She's gotten more books on bread and baking than I can count from our library in the last month or so and reads them whenever she gets the chance, so I've been able to ask her about things she's read--sometimes about the mechanisms that make bread rise and sometimes about why you should use a specific brand of oven mitt to take your bread out of the oven.

But my interest in knowledge goes beyond just bread questions. I ask my girlfriend (a biology major) about things like telomeres all the time. I ask my friend in nursing school about the spinal cord, I ask my friend in IT about bits and bytes.

I like hearing all of these things, they're all usually at least passingly interesting to me and I try to remember as much as I can about them.

This thirst for knowledge unfortunately sometimes lead me into doubts about my chosen discipline in school and what I want to do with my future. I love reading, and writing, and talking about literature. I even love learning and understanding the mechanics of the English language, and how they are similar or different than other languages. But literature doesn't deal in many hard facts. Even the mechanics of grammar are fluctuating things; they are more in flux now than ever before with the rapid, lose forms of written communication provided by the Internet and cellular phone texting. I have no doubt that within fifty years the difference between "your" and "you're" will be totally forgotten and "your" will be the only form of that word.

I'm serious, people will literally forget that "your" ever was "you're". Think it couldn't happen? When was the last time you said, "let us" instead of "let's". Do you even type "let's?" I bet you type "lets".

The lack of hard facts, though. It bothers me. Not because I demand that questions should have a straight answer. I love arguing about the interpretations of a story, of the actions of the characters in a book or play, what a poet felt when he wrote a stanza.

I worry, though, that this sort of thing doesn't actually help the world in any way.

I'm a big fan of science and all the amazing things that it has done for us as a species. Science and the scientific method has freed us from superstition and ignorance, given us insight into how the world works and helped us to understand how we can fit into it. So many times I'll look at the cold realities that science can show us and compare it to the ephemeral, shifting ideas about literature and language and fear I've wasted my time and energy learning more about iambic pentameter than protons.

Because, well, people don't read. I don't know if they ever really did, but now they certainly don't. All things need to be condensed into bite-sized morsels of information, preferably fitting onto an iPhone screen. Newser's motto is "Read Less, Know More." Can you read less and know more?

Maybe you can.

That's what fucks with my head so much, you see?

Sure, you can't be a scientist or a computer technician or a doctor without lots of reading, but that's not really reading, it's just studying. You're just drilling information into your mind for later retrieval. Reading literature isn't like that. Literature is a journey you take, seeing the sights the author has lain out for you and recalling them later to understand the story's meaning (or its lack of one.)

But what good does that do anyone? Why waste your time learning about Beowulf when you could be learning Oracle? I struggle so much with that question, and often cannot defend it, even to myself. I look at my friends and loved ones and see them all maturing into adults with jobs, careers even, using skills learned at schools where they had to deal with real things, computers or corpses or mechanical objects.

I struggle to even find the right way to explain my self-doubt and frustration and this problem.

I can't really explain why I love the study of literature and stories, some of them hundreds or thousands of years old. I can't explain it to myself and that's what scares me. Is it just because I'm good at it? Because I'm good at reading and that makes me feel good, feel superior to people in some way even if they know more about musical timing or mathematics or something? I don't know. I hope not.

The joke about liberal arts majors working at Starbucks or whatever is a stale one, but I fear it has a lot of truth built into its foundations. I literally know liberal arts majors who hold college degrees that to this day, as we push further into our late twenties, work, literally, at Starbucks.

Is this a problem with learning about art or music or literature instead of science or medicine?

Is it a problem with our society?

This is the only reason I can sometimes use to defend the "liberal" education to myself, sometimes. The society we live in is a very materialistic one. And I'm not a guy who uses terms like materialistic very often. Until I was maybe seventeen the only thing I thought of when I heard someone claim someone was "materialistic" was materia and I hoped they'd start casting spells around. But yeah, the materialism of our society is vast and permeates everything from school to jobs to entertainment.

So you know what? Fuck that.

Maybe studying literature won't cure cancer or find out how we can turn lead into gold (or rocks into gasoline I suppose) but there has to be more to life than those things. Science tells us that humans are just animals with highly evolved cognitive functions. We probably evolved the ability to predict the future to be better hunters and as a side effect became self-aware and were able to aspire to more than just chasing down an antelope or digging up some seeds. As far as we know we're the only beings in the entire universe with this power of total sapience. I'll grant some animals probably have self-awareness, but none of them have it at the same level as humans do.

So yeah, I think we do need the study of literature. Because stories tell us who we are. Science can give us the tools for our life, but the stories we tell give us the direction, and learning about those stories, learning to think about them and what they mean, will make us better people.

This is something that people have lost sight of as college becomes devalued by all the people attending like our parents did. They go to a university not for a "universal" education, which is what they system was created to provide, but instead for a skill and the promise of a better job. In the past people with college degrees would be hired for better jobs because the idea was that they had proven they were able to think and not just learn. That's what college is about, and not many things can teach you to think about things as a good argument about Hamlet can.

Okay so debate about nearly anything could lead to better thinking, but I think that arguing about whether or not Sooki should be considered a whore or a slut leads to less revelation than talking about stories crafted to have real meaning.

Colleges shift more and more into high schools, with a rote list of broad classes and perhaps a few more specific ones. Tests are standardized, multiple choice questions and thinking is downplayed for the fact that you're just here to learn what you need to learn before trying to get a better job. Eloquent communication is cast aside. People confuse the terms "their" "there" and "they're" and claim anyone correcting them is a grammar Nazi.

But how many of those people honestly don't know which of those words is the correct one? A shockingly large amount, I'd bet.

I feel like I'm rambling off onto a different subject here, so allow me to try and reign this all in with some sort of conclusion, even as my mind itself struggles with the argument I'm trying to make.

Studying literature makes people better. There. That's my claim, and I believe it. I think that people who study literature and read good stories and really try to understand and think about what they read will become better, smarter people. They can think, they can comprehend.

I once had a teacher who tried to teach me Latin. I don't know if I really retained much of the Latin (not because she was a bad teacher, she was one of the best teachers I've ever had--I was simply a terrible student) but I'll always remember a quote she told the class when we were talking about something similar to what I've been rambling on about in this blog post.

She told me that a person thinks about things, and an educated person thinks about ideas.

So, why don't you just think about that idea?

Average

People say that practice makes perfect. More and more I view this blog as just that-- a writing exercise I can undertake whenever I want with whatever parameters I think would suit it. Because writing is something that takes practice. I realize that more and more as my life slips past me and I stare down the terrifying prospect that is being a thirty year old man.

I realize that, on the whole, being a thirty year old man is not actually a terrifying thing. There are many worse things I could be than a thirty year old man. I could have cancer, I could be a black man in the early eighteenth century, I could be dead.

But it's still quite scary being on the 20 side of 30 and not being where you imagined yourself when you were on the teen side of 20. Not that I ever gave it that much thought, if we're being honest. I really never thought about my future in any real concrete terms when I was a kid. Even when I was in high school I wasn't concerned with the idea of my future. No one ever really talked to me about going to college in anything but the most basic and abstract terms, like, "Oh I guess maybe your dad put away a bit of money for you to go to school with or really anything at all." No one ever said that I needed to go to college, even that I should, until my senior year of highschool when I was basically told I had screwed up so badly with scheduling classes the last two years that I'd be repeating another year of highschool and I responded by dropping out.

My mom took me to see a therapist and he said I should go to college.

The guy also had a light that he claimed could "heal" you with certain frequencies of light strobes and listened to whale-song while I was in his office. Take that how you want it.

So I thought, yeah, sure, I'll go to college! I was eighteen at the time.

I didn't go to college until I was twenty-two.

I still haven't graduated as I approach my twenty-seventh birthday.

You may be starting to notice a pattern, huh? Like perhaps I have trouble finishing things?

Let me tell you something--that is like the absolute shittiest thing to have when you want to be a person who writes things for other people to read.

Writing takes a lot of self control. Especially if you're not writing for a company or for a book deal or something. When you're just writing something you want to write and hope that people will like it or be willing to print it or even (in my wildest dreams) give you money for it but none of that has come to pass it takes a serious commitment and self confidence to force yourself to not only slap the idea down on the page, but then to edit it, to fix the errors and logical problems and slice out the bad parts and try to come up with the good parts. You're doing all that in your spare time with no promise of reward or recognition and-- at least in my case--with this annoying little voice in the back of your head reminding you how crap everything you're writing is, how there are people out there writing better things more quickly than you and you can never ever live up to even half of what they're putting out with apparent ease.

It's hard for me to form an objective opinion on my own writing for obvious reasons. I think it's good, okay maybe. I don't know how good, though. I really have no idea if it's even remotely interesting for people to read any stories (or blogs) that I write. People like my girlfriend tell me they enjoy my stories, but I can't help but hear that same voice telling me they're just saying that so as to not hurt my feelings, or they mean it but can't look at the writing objectively because they're close to me.

I'm sounding like a whiny kid, though, and I'm going to take a step back.

Okay, better.

The point I was trying to make before I was side-tracked by my own self-doubt is that writing on your own is very hard--even for a person with serious drive and self-motivation and I am the least self-motivated person that I know in the entire world. I'm so lazy that sometimes even when I know I'm supposed to write something that actually matters (like a midterm paper or something) I'll sit and watch the deadline sail by me, waving as it goes.

My laziness and ability to procrastinate shocks even me sometimes. I've gotten so bad about it that I have over two-hundred hours logged playing Team Fortress 2. Now, I like TF2, it's a good game, but probably not 200+ hours good. Why do I spend so much time in it? Because it's easy for me to start it, join a sever, and play for however long I want. I've evolved so far into procrastination that   I even procrastinate my procrastination activities. I'm not willing to summon up the wherewithal to start playing a single player or story driven game where I'll actually have to commit to the game so I just play TF2. I've caught myself thinking about other games to play while playing TF2 but procrastinating switching to those games--a process that would take maybe thirty seconds and involve nothing more than slight movements of one of my fingers and my wrist.

All of this is happening as I procrastinate doing something more important like cleaning, or homework, or writing.

Writing is important to me. Not this blog thing, as I said, this is just practice. Something to keep my writing muscles from atrophying totally away. The real writing I do (occasionally) matters very much to me. It's just scary to do it. There are ways of getting the stuff I've written out to people now, even to make some money off of it (maybe) and I've taken steps to allow myself access to these systems--but I'm scared. More scared now that I could be on the cusp of putting my real work out into a seriously public place. 

Is it because I'm afraid people will say it's bad?

Sure, partially, no one wants to be told their work sucks. You want people to say nice things about stuff that you put yourself into, because you want people to say nice things about you. Creating something--whether it's a story or a song or a painting--is putting your mind into a physical form and saying "Look at me under my face, under the personality I have created to interact with others, look at the things I think and don't say." And that's scary, sure.

But it isn't my biggest fear. If people say my stories are bad, well, that's depressing--but at least now I have something to go on. Now I can say "This was bad, I can fix it." Or even say, "No fuck you, you have bad taste, this is good."

I'm afraid I'll put this stuff out there.

And nothing will happen.

This blog is a perfect example of that fear. I post stuff on here, link it to my Facebook, and what happens? Not much. I didn't expect it to, of course, and I'm hardly "promoting" my blog--but there's always that little part of you that wants the things you invest in to do well, even if it's the very small investment I've put into this blog.

But yeah, a few views, no comments, just...nothing.

I'm terrified that will happen with my stories. I'll slap them up for download and maybe five or ten or even twenty people get them and then nothing. No one saying "An amazing tour de force! Incredible debut!" (notice people only use those words when reviewing things? And not even everything, just, like, books and some movies), and no one saying "This is utter garbage. I'd rather read Fifty Shades of Gray fanfiction than this shit."

No, just those few downloads and then nothing, just a casual indifference to the stories--lost among the clamor of a hundred other things trying to get people's attention my stories won't amount to anything but the smallest blip possible on their radar.

I'm afraid that all the work and care and thought I put into my stories--that all of myself that I put into them--will amount to nothing more than something that is painfully, pathetically, forgettably...

average.