I’m guest-posting over at Linda G. Hill‘s place this week.
Specifically, I’m hosting her Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday this week; an event I regularly partake in on Saturdays. Of course, I’ll still be partaking, but at double the fun, since the prompt this week is mine, all mine!
*cue evil laugh*
Anyway, if you like what you read here, you might want to head over there and check it out. The prompt is live, too, if you want to jump in and take part.
Just tell them Pav sent you.
Except that when you get there, you’ll find me in the driver’s seat there as well. So you’d be telling me that I sent you.
But, y’know, tell me anyway.
I was going to post something funnier, but my heart just isn’t in it tonight, watching the shootout at a Planned Parenthood, of all things. Jesus Christ.
I love science fiction, astronomy, physics… I can’t get enough. I subscribe to Crash Course Astronomy on youtube. I am counting the days to the new Star Wars movie. So I guess it was inevitable that I would love a show like Mythbusters, which takes a scientific look at everyday turns of phrase and bits of movie magic to see if there’s any actual truth to them.
After filming their final season, the show’s hosts have been on a tour lately, doing speaking engagements and sharing some of their favorite moments about the show around the country.
Last night, they were in Atlanta.
And because my wife is awesome, she got me tickets to the show for my birthday back in July.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the show is a little nichey; that while it has its fans, it’s probably not widespread enough in popularity for most people to even be familiar with it outside of maybe seeing a rerun of it on the weekend. Still, they basically sold out the Fox theatre in downtown Atlanta. Further, the audience was wonderfully diverse: people of all ages and all ethnicities filled the rows, but maybe more impressive were the families, especially those with kids as young as six or seven. And I will happily admit that I spent the bulk of the show with a big dumb fangirly grin plastered to my face.
Still, I didn’t know exactly what the show was all about. I thought they’d show some clips from the TV show, answer a few questions, maybe do a few live demonstrations. But it was a lot more than that.
The show was full of lovely little moments. My heart warmed when they called their first volunteer up onto the stage — an eleven year old girl — who proudly proclaimed that math was her favorite subject in school. Adam talked about some experiments they had run but never been able to use on the show, like a ridiculously explosive, easily accessible chemical that they are forbidden to disclose, and a lab rat that turned cannibal during a food experiment. The usually stoic Jaime got emotional when asked about his most frightening moment on the show.
Simply awesome.
(My brother and I are about thirty rows back on the left.) You can tell based on my formless face-shaped dome head.)
But what I really want to talk about is Adam Savage.
Adam Savage is one of the nerdiest nerds around, putting a gusto and chutzpah into his geekiness that’s really enviable for a more low-key geek such as myself. While I expected to see a few neato science experiments and hear a few funny stories about being on the set (and there was certainly plenty of that), what really resonated with me was the opening moments of the night, wherein Adam told some stories about growing up geeky and what led him to the sort of thinking and experimentation and self-instruction that would eventually lead to a career doing special effects for movies and television and web series about science.
Being the big nerd that I am, I whipped out my pencil and notepad and began scribbling.
Out of the evening, I came away with a list of reading material that I need to look into (100 Years of Solitude, and the works of Raymond Chandler) and some lovely poignant aphorisms about science in particular and learning and being human in general. They were even, believe it or not, applicable to writing. So I thought I’d share a few of them here.
The deeper you go, the harder it gets. Adam told a story about learning to juggle, starting with the absolute basics and eventually undertaking to learn tricks. At first, the gains and improvements came quickly and readily, and he was able to master new facets of the skill every couple of days. (As a fellow novice juggler, I can certainly identify.) But very quickly, you come up against a wall beyond which the improvements become harder to achieve. While he mastered basic juggling in under a week, it took him well over two weeks to master even a few simple tricks, and he found he simply didn’t have the drive or the time needed to undertake it further. As a result, he’s a decent if not impressive juggler. And, well, that’s like writing, or hell, like anything really, innit? Anybody can do it, anybody can undertake to string sentences together and even craft a narrative. But if you want to be good, if you want to impress people with your talent, well, you’ve got to slay a whole other sort of beast. You’ve got to live and breathe with your work for long months and years, you’ve got to study, practice, think about language, try and fail in a thousand different ways. In short, you have to put in the miles. I’d wager that most would-be writers don’t have the gumption to do that. It remains to be seen whether I do.
The Champion of one notch above mediocrity. As a result of all this, he became just barely decent at a lot of things: he had fascination with tons and tons of different skills and ideas, but didn’t have the follow-through to devote himself to get really good at any one thing. As a result, he was seasoned in lots of areas and knew a little bit about a lot of subjects, but never became an expert in any of them. I think we could all take a page from that book. There’s value in trying lots of things, even things you don’t expect to plumb the depths of (see my collection of Flash Fiction for examples). Out of those tiny forays comes growth, comes a broadening of the experience.
Failure is always an option. If you watch Mythbusters, you’re familiar with this little epithet already; rare is the episode that doesn’t feature an experiment blowing up — sometimes literally, often dramatically — in their faces. But this isn’t a setback. In fact, they seek this moment because if you simply skate through an experience and everything goes to plan, you maybe enjoy a bit of success, but you don’t really learn much. Failure, however, is a fantastic and ruthless teacher; nothing teaches you how not to suck like picking over the charred and smoldering remains of your failed forays beyond mediocrity. Unless you failed at skydiving. No second chances in skydiving.
Art and science are just two different kinds of storytelling. This one shook me to my core. I like to think there’s something magical and even otherworldly about storytelling, in the artistry of a nicely turned phrase, the cleverness of a well-tuned plot. But as with so many things, the moment I sat down to think about it, the pieces started sliding into focus like a Magic Eye painting. Stories tell us why people do the things they do. Science tells us why the world is the way it is. We love art because it speaks to worlds and people and emotions that might be, and we love science because it shows us the magical things we never knew about the world we currently inhabit. Furthermore, I don’t think you can have a good story without science — even if it’s just the inexact science of human interaction — nor can you have good science without a bit of art — the elegant organization and tracking of variables, the spiraling recursion of repeatability.
I’ve gone on enough, but suffice it to say that while I went to the show expecting a bit of fun, I came home with a whole new respect for a show I once thought of merely as a diversion.
About two years ago I pulled a switcheroo in my daily shower prep. Given that I have less hair than ever these days (at least on my head), it’s hard to make any major changes, but I gave this one a try. I traded in my multi-bladed razors for an old-school double-edged safety razor.
Okay, OKAY. Settle down. I’m not here to go on a long-winded rant about how contemporary razors are garbage and the old-school stuff is way better. There are great swathes of the internet dedicated to such stuff. You can find them if you so choose.
All that really matters is that after an initial period of adjustment, I have found shaving with an old-school razor to be much more relaxing, pleasurable, and satisfying way of performing what was once just a drab, do-it-and-get-it-over-with task in my morning routine. It takes a little more time and a little more care, but the results, in my opinion, are well worth it.
So what? Well, the other morning I found myself in a little bit of a rush. My wife and I had somewhere to be, and I didn’t have the time to do a full and proper shave, But, I needed a shave pretty badly (I go from five o’clock devil-may-care to mountain man in about five hours), and I still have a few disposables in a drawer, so I figured, what the hell, I’ll just grab a quick shave in the shower like I used to do.
But they say you can’t go back, and shaving is no exception.
I got most of the whiskers off my face, sure. But the razor tugged and pulled and nicked, skipping and jumping all over my face in a motion about as smooth as that of an epileptic donkey seizing out at a disco. And when I got out of the shower, I found that my beard was mostly gone, but still extant in patches and stripes and tufts, like a feng-shui garden designed by my three-year-old. I needed a second pass to clean up the scraps, which still didn’t get me to where I wanted to be, but by that time, my time was up and I had to get out of there.
So I got my shave in three minutes as opposed to ten, but at what cost?
Worse still, I was struck with the realization that this used to be my normal. I used to think that that was simply the way you shaved, and without a hell of a lot of time and discomfort and razor burn and ingrown hairs to show for it, you couldn’t do a better job. So I didn’t. I had a sloppy shave every day, and I didn’t know any better. Now, though, I don’t have an excuse.
Okay. Shaving talk over, writing metaphor begins. Here’s the point: when I picked up wetshaving (yeah, that’s what it’s called. I know. I’M SORRY) two years ago, I learned a (for me) vastly superior way of doing something I had to do every day. It required a bit more time than what I was used to, but it was better in virtually every other way. And now, knowing the better way, I almost can’t stand the thought of doing it any other way. Seeing and feeling that patchy, amateurish Mach 3 face-butchering irked me on a deep emotional level. I knew it wasn’t my best work, and I knew I’d cut corners to get a shoddy end result.
So it is with writing. (So it is with anything, for that matter.)
I’ve been whacking away at this writing thing with the equivalent of a Mach 3 idiot-proof blade, cutting narrative swathes out of the lumberjack beard of my creativity with a weird, reckless abandon. It gets the job done, but the end result is hardly something I should be bragging about. (Let me qualify. I still believe that any written novel is worth bragging about. But the rub is: I know I could — and probably should — be a lot better.) And sure, you get better at anything by actually doing that thing, but you’ll get even better with some actual targeted practice and mindful application than you will by blindly flailing around with a razor.
All that is to say that I’m going to be taking some time over the next month or so — in the downtime before I go back to editing the recently finished draft — to do some targeted practice. Less raw creating, less vomiting words and unformed ideas onto the page, more consideration of form and technique.
Which may not make much difference for what you see around here.
But I certainly hope it makes a difference in my capital “W” Writing. You know, the stuff I hope to get people to actually pay for one day.
Also, I’m a dad whose son is going to be headed off to the hallowed halls of learning soon, so Common Core is doubly my jam. Apparently, lots of parents in my generation struggle with the way they’re teaching math now, and that’s a problem, because math is hard enough for kids without coming home and seeing that their parents can’t do it either. Which is not a situation that I want my kids to be in. So I did a quick search to see if I could get a handle on this “new math” thing.
And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. For clarity, here’s what I read:
Notice how many occasions for error and how much switching between addition and subtraction is required. This is a system built to fail.
Now here’s Carney explaining the new way subtraction is taught:
They key to (new way) is realizing this subtraction problem is asking you to measure the distance between 474 and 195. You do that, in turn, by measuring the distance between landmarks (easy, round numbers). It’s turning math into a road map.
So 474-195.
Starting point is 195. How do we get to 474? Well, first we’ll drive to 200.
(1) 200 is 5 from 195
(2) 400 is 200 from 200
(3) 474 is 74 from 400
(5) 74+200 = 274.
(6) 274 + 5 = 279.
Not only are there fewer steps, the steps are far less complex. You aren’t carrying, or worrying about adding 10 then subtracting the other thing, then remembering to subtract one from the other column. It’s much straighter.
Now, if you’re like me, you probably read that and experienced a bit of skepticism. The way we learned it is simple; why complicate it by bringing in addition?
Except that the way we learned it isn’t simple. It isn’t any simpler than any other way. It’s only simple to us because that’s how we learned it, and we have, god, I dunno, maybe about ten thousand repetitions of it throughout our educational careers reinforcing that way of doing it? Of course our way is simple and this looks like gibberish.
But our way of doing math is no more intuitive for a child than this “new” way is. One way or another, kids have to be taught subtraction, and whether they do it this way or our way or some completely different way entirely (let’s come back around to this discussion in twenty years or so), the important thing is whether they get the right answer or not.
Come to think of it…
I seem to recall there being some argument about the way math was being taught around the time I was being taught math. Lots of parents couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Tom Lehrer even had a song about it:
Which is great for making you feel very, very confused if you never learned how to do math in base 8. (What, you didn’t learn how to do math in base 8? That’s okay, NOBODY knows how to do math in base 8.)
Back to my point: there’s pushback on the current state of affairs in math classrooms. So the fargo what? There is always controversy about what’s going on in classrooms. Like it or not, our kids are in those classrooms, and no small measure of their success in life depends upon their success in their classrooms. So, to my way of thinking, digging in your heels and saying “No, this new math is stupid, I don’t get it, and I don’t see why my kid has to learn it” is a little bit like a dinosaur shouting at the oncoming meteor that if it’s all just the same, he’d like to get on munching on these palm fronds.
Boom.
This iteration of mathematical thinking is here. It’s time to get on the train, whether it makes sense to you or not. Guess what? If you’re a parent, it’s your job to make sure you understand at least some part of what your kid is learning in school. And I’d much rather take a little time to learn something myself so that, when my kid comes home with a math problem he doesn’t understand, we can work through it together, than the alternatives: he flunks out since he sees dad doesn’t care enough about math to learn it, or we hire a tutor because dad can’t be bothered.
If you struggle with the way they do math, I’m not judging you.
But if you are sitting here insisting that Common Core math is bad and needs to be repealed because you don’t understand it, then I am judging you.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. Common Core in all disciplines has no shortage of flaws, but holy cheese doodles, at least educators are trying new things to fix our abysmal test scores. Point is, for the moment, this is the only train running. You can either hop on or walk.
Now.
This is a writing blog, as I said before, so — is there a tie-in here to writing?
You betcha.
Because the person who can’t — or won’t — wrap his or her mind about the “new math” is in a rut. They’re stuck in a routine that’s comfortable, that they see no reason to change. Which is all fine and well as long as they stay insulated in their own particular corner of the world.
But, short of living out your life on a mountainside, draping yourself in the skins of the animals you slay for food, the world has a funny way of not allowing you to remain insulated. You have to interact with other minds, which means interacting with other ways of thinking.
The good writer will embrace this inevitability. He’ll adapt his craft based on new things he learns, he’ll absorb and experiment with ideas from the world outside his bubble. He’ll continue to craft stories and characters and worlds that reflect the changes going on in the world around him rather than rowing his boat backwards against the current. The good writer — hell, the good human — will see something that challenges his way of thinking and examine it, poke at it, see what makes it tick, rather than casting it aside as a foolish diversion.
To do otherwise is to live in the past.
To do otherwise is the antithesis of growth.
To do otherwise is the root of so much conflict in our world it absolutely makes my head spin.
Give the new stuff a try. Just because it’s strange to you at first doesn’t make it wrong. It just means you haven’t tried it yet.
This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.
For example, somehow, some way, I’ve come up against this thing several times in the past few months:
This is a Chemex, and if you haven’t heard about it, BOY OH BOY it’s time to buckle up. A Chemex is a coffee pot. But it’s not your ordinary coffee pot. Well, yeah, it’s an ordinary coffee pot, but it also has MAGICAL POWERS. The power to transform an otherwise ordinary human being into an absolutely insufferable coffee snob. The power to infuse said human’s vocabulary with nonsensical coffee jargon like “brewology.” The ability to cause friends and acquaintances of that person to, in tiny, almost unnoticeable ways, hate that person.
There are videos dedicated to the Chemex and how to best use it. There are detailed, multi-step guides with entire nested webpages devoted to it. In particular, one of my favorite authors of late and one of my favorite youtube channels have both written and explained in great and grating detail how much they love their Chemex.
The secret behind it (apparently, if you buy into all that neo-hippie coffee-infatuada nonsense) is: you like coffee, sure, but you’re not getting the most out of your coffee.
With that, you fall down the rabbit hole. You buy the thing. You have to get the right filters to go with the thing, filters made from recycled thousand-year-old rainforest wood. You have to get the right coffee beans for your particular demographic and unique taste. You have to hand grind the beans using stones purified in the bowels of goats. You have to boil your water in a kettle, preferably one consecrated by an aged, castrated bishop. The boiling must be done using a hand-torch crafted by the elders of unnamed tribes in the heart of Africa. The steam must not be allowed to escape; you must inhale every molecule to open up your nose for the taste explosion that’s about to happen.
And I hear about this, and I ponder on my life and the choices I’ve made, and I find myself starting to think, well, hot holy hell, maybe I should get one — I AM missing out on this vital part of the coffee experience. Except I don’t drink coffee. And I really find all this gobbledygook about filters and glass and grinding and inhaling to be utter nonsense. Not only nonsense, but wasteful and snobbish nonsense, the worst kind. If you want a cup of coffee, just make a cup of coffee and get on with your life — why do you need to devote twenty minutes of your morning to it?
So I prepare to make a scathing diatribe about exactly how foolish it is. An all-out attack, not just on users of this product, but on anybody who gets at all uptight about their coffee. IT’S JUST BEANS.
But when I pull back to let this stone fly, I pause, because I catch my own reflection in the walls of this glass house I live in.
Sure, I couldn’t give two randy Sharknados about coffee, but you’d better believe I’ve got my own series of oddities.
I could go on and on and on about the “right” running shoes and the “right” way to run. How your shoe needs to provide protection from the ground but not insulate your foot from feeling the bumps in the road. How you need to adjust your footstrike (and there I go using nonsensical jargon) to properly engage the musculature of the leg and the back. How the average runner should aim to run on trails from time to time rather than pounding pavement all the time because of the instability the body has to deal with.
I could ramble for ages about my writing process. The right music to help empty and focus my mind, the right programs to capture the draft and insulate myself from distractions. When writing longhand, I much, much, much prefer pencil to pen; the faint skritch of graphite on paper is soothing beyond words. Preferably, it’s a .7 gauge mechanical pencil: smaller and the lead breaks too easily, larger and I feel like I’m writing with a freaking crayon. But if it must be pen, then it’s got to be a Pilot g2. The ink slides out like a seal slathered in syrup, and there’s a crease in the grip that settles right into the grooves in my index finger, and let’s just leave it there before it starts getting uncomfortable in here.
Or shaving. I’ve become one of these guys about shaving recently (though not as bad as some); I use soap or cream from a tub, lather with a brush, shave with an old-school double-edged blade (1000 blades for $10, how could this not be for me?!?!).
For that matter, here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive, by-no-means-in-order-of-importance list of things I feel unnecessarily strongly about, that I have to have just so:
The angle at which papers should be stapled (Diagonal, about thirty degrees from horizontal)
The consistency of scrambled eggs (still moist but not runny)
The position of my hands on a steering wheel (either one resting on top while the other holds at about eight o’clock, or at 10:30 and 1:30)
The delay between when a traffic light changes and when I have a right to honk at you for not noticing the light has changed (three seconds; less is draconian, more and … well, we have places to be, don’t we?)
Shoes in general (the flatter the better, and I could very well give up on dress shoes altogether tomorrow and feel not a bit upset about it; in fact, I could almost give up on shoes as a whole altogether)
The amount of thought and mental distress I’ve experienced over these things is probably much more than I feel comfortable discussing, but suffice it to say, I have realized that humans, as a rule, are a weird bunch.
We gravitate toward others who are weird like us.
We are repelled, or at least puzzled, by others whose weird we don’t understand.
Point is, you can take your gross weird coffee snobbery and your gross weird birdwatching and your gross weird homemade macaroni replicas of famous renaissance monarchs and stay the hell away from me. Go over there. In the corner. Where it’s dark. And weird.
Of course, you can have all you like of my awesome, cool, somewhat-nerdy-but-ultimately-enviable weird.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 