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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| The mirror never lies. Or does it? The mirror can lie. And does--always. Just like pictures can lie. Think of illusions—most magician’s tricks rely on the ability of mirrors to hide the truth through angles or through misdirection. Think of a funhouse where mirrors reflect short or tall or misshapen in some other way. Ultimately, all mirrors, no matter how true, set up a reflection of reality, and such reflections are not reality. For one thing, they are mirrored—showing left as right and right as left. Like fiction, which reflects reality without being it, they give only part of the story, sight without touch or smell or sound or taste. I like mirrors, but not because they tell the truth. I like them because they're strange and magical. |
| Prompt: Is what people learn in schools enough for living this earthly life? Or what are some of the things you learned in life that the schools didn’t teach you? And what would be important to teach young people before they start on their own? Answer any or all of the questions, in any way you wish. I’m not sure that life prep is what schools are about. We go to school, not to learn life skills, but to gain knowledge about what the world is—facts, not experience, if that makes sense. There are some things in every class that help shape who we are, however, a person can function in society without knowing how to add or write a paper. They won’t do as well unless they can balance their finances or communicate appropriately to the various levels of people they interact with (a friend has a different layer of communication than a boss or a teacher or a child or a student). We also go to school in order to learn how to interact with people—to learn how they work, to gain friends, to learn what to do when people don’t like who we are, to learn how to contain temper and to move in socially acceptable ways. We learn that in other places too, of course, but for some, school is where we find who are peers are and what our place in their world is. Of course there are things we need to know and experience that cannot be learned in school. For example, we need to learn how to take care of ourselves, from running the washing machine to feeding ourselves to brushing our teeth to using a vacuum cleaner. We don’t expect to learn those kinds of functional necessities in school, although they are vital to become a fully autonomous adult. A person who never learned how to clean up after themselves is always at the mercy of the person who takes up that burden. So, the simple answer—no. We don’t learn everything we need to live in school. A person should live so that they learn continually. Every day should give us something more, some new word, some new idea, some way that we can adapt to the world that is changing around us. |
| Prompt: If you have ever met a highly manipulative person, what are the characteristics, actions, or feelings of such a person? Or if you haven’t met one, can you imagine what they’d be like, and could you use such a character in your fiction? Can you make him or her the protagonist, antagonist, or a secondary character? Yes, I’ve met highly manipulative people. In fact, in some ways, my grandmother and mother fall into that category. The thing is, it’s possible to manipulative and not mean with it—it frustrates me sometimes, the way my mother is, but she doesn’t do it maliciously. She does it because that was what she was taught. And her mother—well, Grandma was a difficult woman who led a difficult life. It’s too easy to assume that someone who is manipulative does it for their own gain—some people do it because they want what’s best for other people and think they know how to get there. Frustrating. But not hurtful. So, the important thing to remember in fiction is that a character needs more dimensions than just the one. Sure, a person moves behind the scenes to make sure things work out the way she thinks best, but what are the motivations. What’s the end goal? Is it selfish or is it selfless or somewhere in between? Does the character take into account people who are harder to manipulate, and how does he or she deal with them? Is he or she able to work things around so that what she wants them to do is something they come up with on their own, given minimal prodding? We all manipulate or situations and the people around us when work to make things go the way we want them to. Arguments, discussions, conversations—at the core, we are talking to express our world view and perhaps, seeing the world through the other person in the conversation’s eyes. And if we change or if someone else is changed in the process . . . well, that’s living in a world where we are not alone. So, given that, I think that I have and would use a manipulative character in fiction as any one of the kinds of characters, depending on the story. |
| Since Fivesixer ☮ likes facts on Fridays, let's give him 11 uses for a drinking straw except drinking that's too dang easy. I'm not sure I can come up with eleven--but here goes. 1. Blowing spit wads at other people. 2. Pea shooter. 3. Bracelet. 4. Coaster (this requires some twisting and possibly some kind of fastener. 5. Something to keep the eight-eighteen month old quiet in a restaurant before the food actually gets there. 6. Sculptural component. Especially when bored at a restaurant. 7. Emergency hair tie (it would have to be an extreme emergency) 8. A thing to wind yarn around for color work. 9. A shuttle for weaving (the thing that passes back and forth between the warp trailing yarn in its wake) 10. A thing to wind the copper bits of piano wire around when trying to reduce a replacement wire so that it fits in the appropriate place. Toothpicks are also good for this use. 11, Flagpole for the toy castle. Hey, maybe I can think of eleven. |
| "Spring is like perhaps a hand / (which comes carefully / out of Nowhere)arranging / a window,into which people look," writes e. e. cummings, using the image of a hand and its actions to describe the nature of spring. His musings go on in the poem to make various imaginative leaps, but its twists and turns are held together by the shared exploration of a specific subject. Try writing your a poem, short story or blog entry that begins with, "Spring is like..." and explore the season through similes. Spring is like paint laid over a canvas in layers—the light green fuzz of leaves just budded, white flowers blanketing the dogwood trees, daffodils smiling sunshine into grass growing greener by the brushstroke, sunshine layering stronger and brighter and warmer until suddenly, the naked world is clothed again and spring is here—the painting complete. Spring is like a tap—in turns dripping slow and steady as a leaking faucet, rushing with the power and majesty of Niagara, or misting with the warm, steady gentleness of a showerhead, washing winter away and leaving water in its wake. Spring is water—the rivers rising by painful inches until they overflow and coat the bases of trees and pylons and fences with mud. Good, strong, healthy mud that is ready for things to grow. Spring is a thickening in the air. It is mists of pollen spreading the fall over the earth in a green cloud that coats walkways and cars and roads with its sticky presence. It is like nature reminding us that we are not in control—we are the strangers here, the ones who choke on life where all other living things thrive. Spring is like a child’s naptime—waiting and needed and put off until the world gets cranky and falls awake in a single burst of spring that a person could blink and miss on the day that winter turns to summer. |
| Zachary Schomburg's poetry collection Fjords Vol. 1 (Black Ocean, 2012) was inspired by his desire to write poems based on the dreams his friends had shared with him. In an interview for the Pleistocene, he explained that part of his process was "e-mailing my friends or having a beer and talking to them about their most interesting dreams or their most recent dreams, and trying to make poems out of them." The resulting poems have the odd clarity of dream logic. Have you ever written poetry or stories based on your dreams either your own or friends? Let's discuss dreams a bit. Do you believe writing about yours or someone else's dreams can be beneficial? How reliable do you think dream recall is? I don’t remember my dreams. Certainly not as images. When I remember my dreams, it’s generally as words—like I was reading them out in my mind. Of course, sometimes that is very image filled and vivid. But because I don’t really remember my dreams, I don’t really write based on them. Sometimes I write things that have been wandering around my head for a while. I have also written scenes and poems that feel dreamish to me, but they are always polished and based on craft, not on memory. My problem is, in order to feel true, I can’t take the dream wholesale. Both fiction and poetry need more logic than I get from my jumbled memory of dreaming. So, if I write something that is dreamish, it has come from my head through my fingers in a conscious stream, although that stream may have less structure than most of what I write. I don’t know if writing dreams is beneficial. I don’t write as a form of therapy. I write because I have to. Because of that, whether a particular subject is beneficial feels irrelevant. I mean, I write some funny and some sad and some weird, but the point is, I’m not writing to get things out of me. I’m writing to entertain and because the voices in my head need out. I have found that even if I try to recall a dream, I don’t. Like I wake up with a nightmare, and I’m sure I’m going to remember it and five minutes later, I don’t. Maybe that’s just me. But I can’t speak to anyone else’s recall. |
| Prompt: What do you think affects a good night’s sleep in a negative way? The kind of bed, the pillows, the covers, life’s stresses, relationships, noise, illness, medication, and/or anything else you can come up with, in addition to all of the above? I choose e. All of the above. For me personally, right now the thing most affecting my sleep is that I stay up too late and get up too early and I’ve spent the past fourteen hours up and at work (I’m volunteering, so only half a day as a receptionist and still looking for real work), reading, and then knit night and I’m tired because I only got five hours of sleep. And I’m not fully recovered from Sunday. It was a long day because I had choir practice then I led the music in the service and gave a talk to the congregation, taught my Sunday school class, and choristered a game of Name that Hymn. So, I’m so tired that I’m forgetting my thoughts from one sentence to the next. Which isn’t that hard to do for me. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out where some thought tracked in from. Sorry—proposition ending a sentence. Sometimes when I’m really tired, I lose words. Not the complicated ones. I lose little words like “milk” but can remember “colloidal suspension” which really messes with my head. Ah well. Anything can mess with sleep, and does. But sometimes, you just need to finish the book before you go to bed. |
| Prompt: What's one of your most favorite Springtime activities, and how did you happen to get into it? I don’t really have things I only do in the spring, although I have been a student most of my life, and spring is one of those times of year (like Christmas) where finals are involved. If we count finals avoiding activities, I have several things I’ve started because it was spring. For example, around Christmas time, I make little crafty things like Christmas tree ornaments because I’m avoiding studying for finals. I just need something to make my brain slow down enough to sleep. In the spring, ornaments are less effective as time wasters. Instead, I started cross-stitching because of spring finals fever. I also started knitting at about that time. I knit a lot, and I started because I was trying to avoid the over burdened brain effect that strikes during the spring. There’s something about the spring that makes me tired. Even now that I’m out of school, I see the trees growing greener and feel the air warming and I feel like hibernating, like I’ve been moving too much over the winter and my brain is overloaded, and it’s time to relax. I don’t spring clean. Today I slept for about three hours after church (it was a long day—I basically was on for four hours straight). I really want another nap. sigh. |
| “Sometimes love is nothing more than a sticky web; illusions spun from clever minds and bitter hearts.” ― Nicole Lyons "Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.” ― Derek Landy, Death Bringer What's worse--- telling someone the truth and hurting their feelings or lying to them to spare their feelings? I personally would rather someone told me a truth than a lie. I would rather hear truth in such a way that it wasn’t cruel. That’s one of my rants—honesty doesn’t mean cruel, and when people say something in such a way that it was said just to hurt, that’s not being honest. I think in such an instance, I would rather keep quiet than lie or hurt someone with an unpleasant truth. For example, there are things I don’t tell my mother, true things that would hurt her because they are behaviors that are ingrained for all her life, and even though they hurt me, I love her enough that I don’t want her to be hurt by something she couldn’t change. Because of that, sometimes I refuse to answer a question or to say anything at all because I don’t lie, but I can’t say that truth that would hurt her. Sometimes, when my blood sugar was high or I was generally irritable, I have said it. And every time I do, I feel cruel, and I don’t like that feeling. So I avoid it. Love is giving the ability to hurt us to someone who we trust not to. |
| Have you ever done karaoke? What kind of songs do you like to do? If you haven't... have you thought about it? I have done karaoke. My problem is that while I know lots of songs, they tend not to be the recent songs that most karaoke bars play, so I have to go with oldies, and then, it all depends on if I can recognize that I know a song from the title, which sometimes isn’t the case. I don’t really recognize songs from the title or the artist. But if I hear it, I am likely to know it. I do like to sing. Of course, I have a good ear for pitch, so that can be a problem in a group karaoke setting. And I’m kind of shy, so getting in front of everyone bugs me a bit. I think the last time I stayed in the background, wanting to be brave enough to since and not doing it. But I have been up on the stage singing for everyone before . . . it was the day and the company, I think. I have a better time if family’s around. |
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