As much as I enjoy going home for extended breaks, they always have this tendency to suck me into a void of doing absolutely nothing. I make plans and do stuff, but in the end I spend most of the day sleeping, in front of the computer, or watching TV. I end up feeling gross after about a week, and so I end up happy to go back to the schooling life.
This, of course, is a cry for help. I’m in the Inland Empire just outside of Los Angeles. Please save me.
There are some things I will never be able to put into words no matter how often I write.
This weekend I had the opportunity to drive from my comfortable little Suburban home outside Los Angeles to Barstow, CA then Primm, NV. Prior to a couple of days ago, I’ve always considered Barstow to be more of just a crappy little suburb much like the one I live in except out in the middle of nowhere. Behind the wheel on a wide highway I had the opportunity to re-evaluate California’s High Desert. Adventures with my automobile tend to allow for this.
After miles of soaking in sun and the various awesome earth formations lining the I-15, I reached an area where it seemed as if there was fog hanging really close to the ground. I thought that it was rather odd that there would be fog at all in such hot dry weather, but the cloud was clearly too white to be a dust storm. As I drove closer to the fog, the road in front of me dipped sharply, revealing the entire inland empire and the LA basin. Ahead of me there was a sign that said “Elevation 4000 feet”. Those were clouds hovering over the inland empire, which happened to be completely level with the desert plateau I had been driving on for miles.
The blogging workshop has been an odd experience for me in terms of developing work and craft. In an acting workshop, writing workshop, or other artistic workshop, there is a continual development of an unfinished work. None of the art can be complete until it has come under the scrutiny of your peers and modified to account for their feedback.
This is kind of the way the blogging workshop works. The scrutiny is there, as is the feedback. But at least for me, there is no sense of this unfinished work, and as a result, there can be no modification. We review published posts, work that has already been released to the public, which for me means that it is finished and can no longer be modified. I will fix grammatical and spelling errors if they are obvious, but I will never change the nature of the piece. What this means is that the workshop only allows for the scrutiny of a person’s writing in general, and in particular with their use of the blog format.
I guess I just wanted to know how the rest of you felt about that. Are any of you willing to modify posts based on feedback in the workshop (or outside it), or is a published post a completed work for you as well?
My entire written world has been thrown entirely off balance.
It used to be the case that academic writing in the science type fields or in the world of argument used to roll of my fingertips. Creative writing was painful to do and never resulted in anything I liked, much less anything anyone else would like. Written conversation was a long and tedious process that could never replace spoken wit. And here I am devoting significant portions of my time, whether available or otherwise, in front of my blog, manning it, tending it, bulking it up.
And it’s not just the blog either. I’ve been spending a lot of time maintaining written contact with a few people, holding full-on conversations in the written format. This comes with my ever decreasing ability to hold conversation without awkward pause, mumbling, or some other obstacle that breaks the pace of a good conversation. Written assignments are available to me but I sure as hell don’t want to do them. I sit down and collect topics for my blog, and on nights like this when I have nothing to do I don’t default to picking up the controller for a good halo session or catching up with The Office. I sit in front of my WordPress console, shaping posts on basslines and rainy days.
These changes are not occurring in a void. I have changed quite a bit, even just in this last semester. At this moment in my life, I have not been on stage in years. Theatre, despite the various reasons I left, offered me a place to not only craft precision in my voice, diction, movement, and body. It called out courage, fearlessness, readiness, alertness in me. I haven’t grappled in years. I’ve always enjoyed fighting in its various forms and had hoped to broaden the scope of my experience to include more submissions and include striking, but they have been significantly less accessible to me than I had hoped. Both these practices are very close, very personal, very compassionate, and very tightly knit to a community that I have now lost. A community which required verbal and physical exchanges to be direct, honest, and if you were really good, have a marked style.
I’ve been further from my closest friends than I have ever been. This isn’t to say that they are inaccessible. I spend time with them often, and keep contact. But the nature of either our geographic proximity or our regular interaction has been forced to change. I am in this odd new space of negotiating new friendships where I have gotten used to always having my closest few. They are still there, but I am not. At least not in the same way.
My hands have done far more talking for me than I ever would have expected them to. I have always considered writing to be a solitary form of communication, leading my preference to the more social verbal communication. But I am here in this somewhat abrupt exploration of life on my own, in an ironic granting of my own request. But I’m not afraid here as I thought I would have been. I’m sure I’ve lost my tongue somewhere around here and I’m very confident that it is here that I will find it. When it returns from its temporary retirement, I’ll be here waiting for it. Until then, I have always been told that I am very good with my hands, despite obviously lacking half of one. They’ll hold up on their own, I’m sure.
I am currently sitting in front of my computer working on a post that I hope to publish tonight. As a soundtrack to this writing, I have decided to acquaint myself with the solo musical stylings of Mr. Bootsy Collins. My monitor is normally a glory to behold, vast and wide, responsive, bright. And this from a man who loved CRT monitors long after their market demise.
One thing I could never stand about CRTs was their sensitivity to Electro-Magnetic Interference. Every cell-phone transmission, speaker signal, power sag or spike would cause the screen to quiver and shake EVER so slightly, perceptible only enough to hurt my eyes and annoy the living shit out of me. My display upgrade has left me nothing but satisfied in especially this respect. Until today when I noticed some slight quivering in the Microsoft blue sky background image of my desktop. Ready to run my fist into my beloved monitor for stabbing me in the back, I went in for closer inspection, only to find that that the very slight quiver was in perfect synchrony with the rubber-band bass of Mr. Bootsy Collins himself. Not even liquid crystal can escape the urge to groove.
God Damn I love the Funk.
This is an announcement I’m not very happy to make but I’m very thankful to be able to make. The OCF has scheduled downtime for this Friday at 10 PM until this Sunday at 10 PM for a disk array migration. Yes folks, I said “scheduled”! What this means for you, mainly, is that you won’t be able to access my blog that weekend and, naturally, that I won’t be posting to it. If you really, REEELY want to read my previous posts, they’re fed into my facebook notes. Those of you who are already my friend will be able to read my entire blog history there. If you’re not my friend, just run a search for my name and you can add me. You can also add my leg if it shows up in the search. It’s a pretty cool leg if I do say so myself. As for posts, If I really feel the urge, I will publish new posts to my facebook notes first, then migrate them to my WordPress blog when the OCF comes back up. I find that situation to be highly unlikely to occur. As you may have noticed, I’m horrible at writing over the weekend.
As spring break draws nearer there has been an expected increase in the number of times the actual phrase “spring break” has been uttered. How boring is that for a blog post, right? Except that now my wildly associative mind has been encouraging me to do weird things at the occurrence of these utterances. Namely, blurting out things like “woo!” or “springbreakWOO!” after someone mentions it, usually coupled with a gesture meant to evoke the image of lifting one’s shirt to expose one’s breasts.
Yeah, after having written that, it has become even more obvious that it’s pretty fucking weird. I do it without thinking most of the time and I’m often left embarrassed and having to deal with unintended … consequences …
And every so often I run into those two people who always know what I’m talking about when these things happen, and I am very thankfully reminded that I’m not just some big, weirdo creep. But if it makes you all feel better, I’ll give you all one last look. Because you’re never going to see these again.
My left shoulder is now pink. I love my balcony!!
There have been some odd occurrences in my life at a time which I would have otherwise considered to have a dull dip in pace.
It seems as if my best friend and my blog workshop cohorts are not the only ones who read my blog. I recently received an emailed response to my ranting posts regarding the OCF downtime from the Secretary of the OCF. I hope to respond to this email soon as I’d like to be able to clarify some of my sentiments as well as address some of the recent updates, but I am very glad my writing managed to find its way to its secondarily intended audience.
For those of you who enjoyed my invitation letter, something happened to day that I don’t think has ever happened before. Not only did two different groups of Kappa sisters wave hello to me through the dining room window, they initiated the wave without my prompting! Now at this point I have no idea if they had gotten a hold of my blog post from this website, from my facebook notes (which import this blog), whether Brenna (their President) told them about me, whether Sam (our social manager) told them about me, or whether they just felt inspired to be neighborly of their own good spirits. But also at this point, I really don’t care. Thank you Kappas! You have reinvigorated my belief in the spirit of neighborhood!
Last (but of course, not least) I finally solved Rubik’s Cube! I did so on a total fluke, sliding faces without keeping track of the moves just to experiment with how pieces changed position based on the concepts we’ve been learning in the class. And all of a sudden all the faces were solved! It’s not anything I think I can repeat in practice at the moment, but I sort of get conceptually why it ended up that way. I think I have officially received my Nerd Badge for completing Rubik’s Cube.
The weather has cooled to a comfortable temperature, but I don’t think I’ll follow through on my promises just yet. I also don’t think I can hang out on the balcony in short sleeves too much longer…
Good Night!
A recent invention by a friend of mine:
