Guitar stuff that makes me happy

Rolling Stone was entitled to their opinion, as I am to mine. Without any of the pressure of trying to come up with a comprehensive list or rating, these are just random guitar things that make me happy.

First of all I should say that I listened to “Smoke on the Water” again, and as well as Boston’s “More than a Feeling” (also one debated in the comments). I have thought of both in the past has having good parts, but not really being great songs, but they sounded better to me today. Perhaps my ears have grown three sizes today.
Maybe someday I will even like Tool. For now, these are things that I already like, and liked right away.

12-string guitars: I still remember the first time I heard one. I think I was heading to soccer practice, and there was a guy sitting down on the grass and playing, and I had never heard anything like it. Honestly, it was kind of magical.

Guys playing Van Morrison on the grass—specifically Brown-Eyed Girl: I suppose it could be overdone, or that other songs could work, but there was this really nice guy in the dorms that was playing Brown-Eyed Girl outside one day, and if I had not liked him before, that would have tipped the scales.

“Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes: If I understand correctly this is actually the bass, accompanied by the guitar playing the bass part an octave apart. Still, there is a guitar, and a bass is a guitar, right? So I’m counting it. There was a girl in the dorms who would play this and “Kiss Off” in an endless loop. Actually, I think it was the same person who was always playing the Warlock Pinchers “Morissey” song. Ah, college.

The Presidents of the United States of America: Speaking of non-traditional, they are missing strings from both their guibass and their bassitar, and it still totally works.

“Burning for You” by Blue Oyster Cult: It is really the only song I know from them, and it doesn’t really seem all that metallic, but I love it.

“Just What I Need” by Rufus King: This is also known as Cliff’s Song from “Bring It On”, and it is almost impossible to find anything on the performer, including whether it is a person or a band (this is partially due to there being a Rufus King High School, and historical figure for whom the high school is name, that clouds internet searches. I still love this song. Actually, both the guitar and the drums here make me happy.

“Take it Easy” by Andy Taylor: Yes I used both this and The Neverending Story to thwart Danielle, but this one rocks in a way that the other does not, and decades later it is still infectious. I usually listen to it with “Wild Wild West” by Escape Club”, and maybe “Inside Out” by Eve 6, because they kind of do the same thing for me.

“My Sharona” by the Knack: I was at a dance after not having been dancing for a long time, and this came on, and I just went nuts. I pulled out dance moves that I did not know I had. Honestly, I always thought it sounded like a Kinks song, and that is a compliment.

“Saturday Night” by the Misfits: This came up on the alternative love songs list. When I was memorizing this, in addition to the regular recording I listened to a few clips of Michale Graves doing an acoustic version too, and let me tell you, it is not the same. There guitar here is amazing, and you need the full effect.

I know I am obsessing a bit on the My Chemical Romance front lately, but I am going to limit myself to two here.

First off, “Summertime”. Unlike “Saturday Night”, this works as both acoustic and regular, which is nice because that makes it easier for kids to do in talent shows, which makes me kind of happy. And it is just beautiful. I can’t explain this right, but I was thinking maybe there was a mandolin or something—there is just a really different sound. It looks like it’s just regular guitars, though, and simply gorgeous.

Also, “I’m Not Okay”. This was my anthem for a while, so it holds a soft spot emotionally anyway, but when I did it for karaoke (after wanting to for three years and being intimidated), I was amazed at how the opening guitar affected me. Usually I was listening to it while working on the computer, or singing it around the house a capella, but standing up there something happened to my legs, like with “My Sharona”, where it was just ‘Where did that come from?’

Often music will suggest various visual images to me, and for that part, even before, the image was of turning up the volume. There is kind of an ascending thing going on there, which could explain it, but mainly I think it’s just because the only logical response to that music coming up is to play it loud. Love that song.

Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Guitar Songs Of All Time

I just finished yesterday. This is a relief, though I was enjoying it more as we got closer to the top.

I personally got the list from Stereogum, through a simple Google search:

http://stereogum.com/10114/rolling_stones_100_greatest_guitar_songs_of_all_ti/list/

Actually, I am not quite done, because although I have gone through and listened to all of the 100, as well as read all the comments, I still want to go through and listen to music from the comments, and this will take a while, as there are many, and most of them are dissenting.

Obviously I have my own disagreements too, but I always feel that way about American Film Institute lists, or book lists, or lists of 100 places to go or foods to eat. 100 is a logical number to use for people who operate on the decimal system, especially when you are in a broad category where just using a top ten would be too restrictive. However, even if picking the number 100 is not arbitrary, once you are making your selections fit inside that number, things do get arbitrary.

Also, I think there can be an issue with definitions. Are the greatest guitar songs great songs that feature guitar, songs that were culturally significant, or songs that are really hard to play? I think the list does some of all of the above.

Personally, I did not find a lot of new stuff that I need to listen to over and over again. Actually, I think I found none of that, and it’s questionable whether I will as I go through the comments. Still, there were things that were good, especially in terms of putting the familiar in a new setting.

First of all, yes, I had heard Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” (69) and The Smiths “How Soon is Now” (90) before, and not thought much about them one way or another, but yes, they do have something interesting going on with the guitar that I had not noticed. That’s kind of cool. (Also, Billy Corgan has hair in the Pumpkins video, and I had not seen him that way for ages. A lot of people say that haired he resembles Gerard Way, but he reminded me most of Tom Delonge.)

It was also very interesting to listen to the Metallica selection, “Master of Puppets” (33). Now, Metallica is a lot like Duran Duran for me (bet you’ve never heard that before). My sisters (and my brother) are big fans, so they have been played a lot around the home. Even our mother recognizes James Hetfield’s voice right away. (Maria had set Mom’s ring tone to “Master of Puppets” briefly, but Mom gets flustered easily, and we just knew that someday it was going to go off in a bad situation and she would not be able to turn it off quickly, and that just was not a good thing.)

Anyway, I have heard Master of Puppets many times, but never really listened to it. While speculating about the list, Maria had thought maybe “Enter Sandman”, and that certainly has strong guitar work, but listening to them both, “Master” is the obvious choice. It starts out intricately, and it is strong and powerful, and then there is a changeover into a completely different theme that is still powerful, and there is just a lot going on.

Now let’s talk about expectations. While speculating, before actually viewing the list, my first thought was that “Eruption” by Van Halen would have to be on it. It comes in at 6, which seems reasonable, Follow up thoughts were that I would expect to see Hendrix, Eric Claption, Jeff Beck, Santana, and Yngwie Malmsteen, and then I wondered about the guys in GTR.

Hendrix (I am totally good with “Purple Rain” being number 2), Beck, and Clapton get multiple mentions, though Clapton is always under a group, not under his name. Incidentally, I had only heard the acoustic version of Layla before, and the other ways makes a big difference there. Santana is there. Malmsteen is not, and from the comments Steve Vai is not. I admit I had forgotten about him, but that does seem like a fairly glaring omission.

I was not too surprised to not find Steve Howe or Steve Hackett represented. I remember when GTR formed people saying it was like if Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were forming a band, but I felt that they never lived up to the hype. It’s not that their music was bad, but it wasn’t what the expectations seemed to be leading to, and maybe they just never had a clear enough vision of what it should be. My understanding is that Hackett is not particularly happy with it in retrospect. Still, nothing on the list from Yes, Asia, or Genesis either.

Another thought that I had later was I remember many years ago thinking that it seemed like all the bands with the best riffs were kind of obnoxious. I can tell you that the bands who inspired that thought were Warlock Pinchers, the Offspring, and Blink 182. None of them made the list. I am glad to see the Clash (“London Calling”, 48) and the Ramones (“Blitzkrieg Bop”, 18) on there. I’m not sure it’s their greatest guitar work, but I’ve never really thought of it. I do sort of feel that Steppenwolf “Born to be Wild” should be on there.

There was a lot of flack about the omission of “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. I suppose the argument against it is that every beginning guitar player picks it out, so it can’t be that hard, but at the same time, doesn’t that right there prove that it is classic and influential? I remember hearing my brother play it over and over again, and so when Jack Black has the kid try it out in “School of Rock” or Jake is moody and just keeps playing that and nothing but that on “Two and a Half Men”, it makes me smile.

I think the counterpoint to it is number 21, “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Someone in the comments complained because he had seen a 7-year old kid playing it, showing how not great a song it was. Of course, someone else complained that “Eruption” should not be on there because it was not a great song, it was one person showing off. So we can go back to definition, but also, I remember when I first heard “Seven Nation Army”, and even though I didn’t exactly like it, I remember thinking how it was brilliant in how it just stripped down and went back to basics after so much overproduced crap was out there.

I did not expect to find My Chemical Romance there, because there seems to be a strong bias towards older music, and I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about how brilliant their guitars are, but remember, part of why I even decided to do this was because I was thinking how much I loved guitar, and I was thinking that because of listening to them. Just wanted to point that out.

Also, I have only just heard the song recently, so I may not have any perspective on it, but "Triumph of Venus" by Torche seems like it could reasonably be included. It just seems special to me.

Other listening material was that I pulled out my Best of Santana CD and all three of my Charlie Sexton CDs and gave them a listen. I don’t think any of Charlie’s work is on there. As a session musician, you don’t always know who is where, but I believe the Stevie Ray Vaughn songs predate Charlie. (He started working in 1983.) Still, interesting thoughts there, that will come back up later.

Also interesting was number 1, “Johnnie B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. My first thought was okay, that makes sense. It is a powerful riff, and it also must have been so new and revolutionary at its time. However, in researching more, I saw this on Wikipedia:

“The opening guitar riff on "Johnny B. Goode" is essentially a note-for-note copy of the opening single-note solo on Louis Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman" (1946), played by guitarist Carl Hogan.”

Well I tried listening to Just Like a Woman, and it may have been the version that I found, but I didn’t hear it. Still, it’s interesting. Who did invent Rock and Roll anyway?

Non-annoying love songs and the alternative list

Here are the songs that do make me feel something. The number is which day of February I posted them on. They aren’t really in any particular order, except I started with the ones where love was more of a bummer and moved up to the ones where it might still be hard, but you have some hope.

1. Joey, Concrete Blonde
2. The World Spins Madly On, The Weepies
3. Only a Fool, Byron Lee and Mighty Sparrow
4. Best I Ever Had, Vertical Horizon
5. More than This, Roxy Music
6. Hey Jealousy, Gin Blossoms
7. Overjoyed, Stevie Wonder
8. Everything's Magic, Angels and Airwaves
9. Mayor of Simpleton, XTC
10. The Promise, When in Rome
11. Bizarre Love Triangle, New Order
12. Tired of You, The Exies
13. Collide, Howie Day
14. All I Want, Toad the Wet Sprocket

As you can see, it is heavily geared towards the past, which goes back to my being out of it, but this listening to new things has not done a lot to convince me that I am wrong. If I were to add another song, it would probably be “Summertime” by My Chemical Romance. (More on that a different day.)

I have a coworker with whom I often discuss music, and I let her see my list, and she provided me with her own alternatives. The lists were quite different, with not a lot of overlap. (Notes are from Lisa.):

1. True- Spandu Ballet (Oh god, that Bithday Cake Scene in 16 Candles)
2. Little Birdhouse in your soul- They Might Be Giants
3. El Scorcho- Weezer
4. Eaten by the Monster of Love- Sparks
5. Everlong - Foo Fighters
6. Saturday Night- The Misfits
7. I got you Babe- As sung by The Dictators
8. I Will Always Love You- Dolly Parton, and I am emphatic --NOT Whitney Houston
9. Maps- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
10. You Make my Dreams Come True- Hall and Oates
11. Unchained Melody- Righteous Brothers
12. Glory of Love- Peter Cetera (Karate Kid 2 oh jeez)
13. Whole Wide World- Wreckless Eric
14. And For Personal Reasons, “A Quick One While He’s Away” By The Who

Spandau Ballet’s “True” and The Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody” were both ones that I considered, but decided against. Also, I am not really against “And I Will Always Love You”, but it would have to be the Whitney Houston version for me, not the Dolly Parton version. “Whole Wide World” I prefer by Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhall. Also, it doesn’t matter who sings it; I hate “I Got You Babe”.

There were also two songs that I considered to be real finds. The first was Spark’s “Eaten by the Monster of Love”. It’s pretty cool, and I had never heard of it before. (I’ve never seen Valley Girl.)

Even more, I was just captivated by “Saturday Night” by the Misfits. Talk about great guitar and vocals. And, there was a real feeling of emotion, though you don’t want to take the lyrics too literally. I was singing it non-stop, and I would like to try it for karaoke, though whether anyone will have them is questionable, and really Lisa should be there. (Not that I would dedicate it to her; that would just be creepy.)

So yes, after immersing myself in love songs for two weeks I did need to kind of limit myself to punk for a month to recover, but I gladly do this for you. And now you have, right here, 28 songs that are more interesting than “Baby”.

Annoying love songs

Regardless of my issues with the music K103 was playing, it was also very popular, so it was reasonable for them to play it. While I do have some thoughts on this being the fault of "the man" controlling airplay now, I have to admit that these popular songs are catchy. This only increased my frustration. I usually have music in my head of some kind, and when it is music I like it's fine. When it is stupid, shallow music with a poorly informed worldview, I feel like I’ve really let myself down.

I mentioned disdain for Taylor Swift and Sarah Bareilles; in addition I grew to really hate Michael Buble. I know at some point he was doing a lot of Frank Sinatra type-stuff, but I had never really heard any of his music. Now there were two songs that I was hearing all the time, and they both irritated me.

The first one, “Don't Go Higher”, just seemed hypocritical. So what are we saying? Is everyone in Hollywood phony except for you? Somehow I have doubts. Yes, the quest for fame can certainly kill your soul, and you can worry about that in the middle of still trying to make it, but it should probably come out sounding a little less danceable--maybe more like “Hotel California” perhaps?

Still, the one that bugged me even more was "Haven't Met You Yet". Yes, yes, everything will be perfect when you meet the "right" one, because that's totally how it works. The "You'll make me work so we can work to work it out" is paying lip service to the idea that relationships take work, but then why is she having to make you work? There is an echo of the same thing in the line about promising to give so much more than he gets. Even if he really believed that, that would indicate an unhealthy relationship where one person is constantly trying to compensate for their own unworthiness. How is that good?

The one that I was kind of torn on was “Break Even” by The Script. Musically it was interesting, but I had started getting cranky. Well if she’s able to leave you so easily, without losing any sleep, maybe you’re better off without her. And if the best part of you was always her, no wonder she left; she doesn’t need you. From a relationship point of view those criticisms are valid, but I also know that you do feel things that are illogical and unfair, and you catastrophize, and you can’t pick on every musical exaggeration.

I guess where The Script came off better is that the song felt like it carried some actual emotional weight, rather than just pretending to.

And again, this could be somewhere that I am completely unfair. Just because it sounds shallow and superficial to me does not mean everyone will feel that way. I’m bringing up these songs on Youtube—I see the comments. There are always comments on Britney songs or Miley songs “This is just how I feel!” Maybe I’m just mean (and romantically frustrated). Still, if we argue that any emotions are valid, that should cover my sentiment that this stuff is crap.

As we approached Valentine’s Day, I thought about how many awful songs were going to be featured, and I came up with my own list of romantic/love songs. I ran a 14-day countdown on Facebook, to be even better than my one week Halloween countdown.

Tomorrow, songs that actually make me feel.

Musical Chemistry

Hey, we’re crossing disciplines. It’s art AND science.
I have been thinking a lot about why people like what music, or not, and part of that is the mechanics of the attraction, but part of that is also what liking means.

For example, some of the pieces that I liked better on the Top 100 guitar list were by Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and I would characterize them more as blues. I like blues, but I never really bring it up to for listening. Where I end up hearing it is at the Blues Festival, and live on a sunny day feels like the perfect way of enjoying blues to me. (I started going to the Blues Festival for zydeco, and that is something I actually have a CD for and play on occasion.)

Actually, it is similar with Duran Duran. I have watched and liked their videos, but somehow I never really listen to them. I do, however, attend their concerts when they come to town, and they put on great shows. I really love them, in that I appreciate their showmanship and I feel affection for them as people. That being said, I don’t own a single CD, and the only time I have brought up one of their videos recently was when I was thinking a character I was working on might dress like the girl in New Moon on Monday. (And I was remembering it wrong, and Jane dresses more like a Ramone.)

Some of this may be that I get plenty of exposure without seeking it out. Both of my younger sisters are huge Duran Duran fans, which is how I ended up at a concert in the first place. In addition, a friend I spent a lot of time with growing up was a huge fan. She is the reason I have seen A View to A Kill. Julie and Maria are the reason I have seen The Saint. (I may not have watched The Living Daylights without a-ha doing the theme song, so I’m not judging.) To some extent I am fine with that, because I do like them, but I don’t usually need them, and it was part of my ornery nature that whenever Danielle would have me pick something to play, I would either choose “Take It Easy” (which I love, from Andy’s solo efforts) or the theme song from The Neverending Story by Limahl (which she had because Nick Rhodes produced it.)

Actually, with my group of friends from junior high, we had a lot of crossover, but none of us had the same favorite bands. Karen leaned more towards the Cure and Dead or Alive, though she and Nicky both loved David Bowie, though that was more for his acting (the Monkees too), and Ericka was very into INXS, though she loved Charlie Sexton like I did, and I was really all about a-ha. (I don’t remember Ann being really into anyone, which makes me wonder if she wasn’t, or if I was just insensitive.)

We all respected each other’s tastes. Back then my only shared concert was with Nicky. We saw the Monkees, along with Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, the Grass Roots, Herman’s Hermits, and a baseball game. It was kind of a long lineup. Later on I saw Faith No More and Billy Idol with Ericka, and Karen and I have seen the Killers, Franz Ferdinand, and Gogol Bordello together, and we would be going to the Black Keys together if I were not going to be out of town. (Well, and I did not attend Duran Duran with Danielle, but she was there.)

Then and now I had different relationships with each of them, even though there were definitely times when we were functioning as a unit. I guess I have different relationships with different artists and different songs. Some are fine to be around, and some are like fingernails on a blackboard, and some I downright need.

One reason I can’t bring myself to really try computer dating is that I am really a love at first sight kind of person, and no, it’s not practical, but it’s how I roll.
Wondering if I was crazy once, I sat down and analyzed the times where it had happened. While in each case it was an instantaneous thing with no background information, both were artistic, and musicians actually (one more than the other). Both were very kind, also, though not particularly patient. When I had a similar attraction to someone else, though it never got as serious, well, I was not particularly surprised to find out that he was a drummer. Of course he was. I guess I had a type.

(Fine, they were also all tall, lanky, and brunette, with good hair and good biceps, but if you are a drummer or a guitar player the arms tend to get developed, and I do not respond that way to people who match the physical description but are not kind and creative.)

To some extent, I have a music type as well. I respond a lot to melody. That is probably why I tend not to like rap, grunge, and metal, where there is more of an emphasis on other things. I like there to be depth of emotion, but also that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I suspect this is why I prefer how the anger as it comes out in punk than in metal. Punk is more humorous than metal. It is probably also why despite my appreciation for “Viva La Vida”, I am not a big Coldplay fan—they’re a little on the serious side too. Maybe that’s my problem with Bob Dylan. And U2! (And my preference for melody may explain why I like some punk bands more than others.)

I was discussing with a friend once that liking someone is more of a compliment than loving them. You’re supposed to love everyone, and when you are a good person it becomes more natural to love people more, so that might be the given. Liking is a gift. I don’t just feel a desire for your welfare—I enjoy spending time with you.

Songs can be like friends and people you know. You like some, and you need others. Some you outgrow, and some, no matter how long it's been, take you right back.

In other words, Alex Chilton is on the radio, and I’m in love with this song.

Music Appreciation

One thing that my music exploration has in common with my reading is that I don’t always know where it’s going to go. Sometimes I have an idea of where it’s going to go, and I’m wrong, and other times I seriously don’t know, but I figure it will go somewhere.

With listening to the “pop” music, I believed it was really just going to be a matter of confirming that my sentiments are correct, and I am not missing anything, and they suck. With the guitar songs, I was hoping that I would find new and cool things for my listening pleasure. Neither has really gone as expected, but they are still going somewhere. (And I am just going to keep putting “pop” in quotes, because it meant something different back in my day.)

With the “pop”, yes, I am perfectly fine not liking it or listening to it. There have been a few laughs, certainly, and I am not a fan of anything new, but there have been some other musings, and I will get to those eventually.

With the guitar, although I haven’t been finding that I really liked (and I am only on number 35), it does at least make me think of things differently. There are some songs that I knew before, but I never really thought about the guitar elements specifically. Listening to them in that context does take me back and think, Yeah, I can see that.

One thing I have been thinking about though, is who likes what, and why. Obviously, there are people who are huge fans of Justin Bieber, and I guess there are reasons for that. Also, though (and this is where it may be perfectly reasonable to question my taste), there are a lot of well-regarded bands by people who know something about music that I do not like at all. I don’t really care for the Beetles, or Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan is, for me, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I have been thinking about him specifically, first of all for the Desolation Row connection, but also, Charlie Sexton plays for him. He has a huge following, and when that very annoying woman on the train indignantly said he was the voice of a generation, she was not wrong.

It reminds me of back when MTV would have guest VJs, or when I would read magazines about my teen idols, and there were bands that I loved that cited influences or chose playlists that really had me going “Huh, really?”

I suppose some of it is a matter of personal chemistry and I will explore that more, but I have also been thinking that it is logical that a professional musician will have a wider range of appreciation.

It is commonly attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, but maybe started with K. Anders Ericsson, this idea that it takes 10000 hours of practice to master something. So, even with no aptitude for guitar, with 10000 hours of practice I could be really good. I still think aptitude is important. For example, I have some drawing ability and I bet I could develop it in only 5000 hours. Writing came faster to me, but between journals, blogs, stories, letters, screenplays, television pilots, and one novel, there could easily be 10000 hours in there anyway. I have not been counting.

I suspect that if you have some natural talent or ease of learning, putting in the time becomes easier, because some of the normal starting frustrations can be moved through more quickly. More than that, though, I think there has to be some great passion. I do kind of like performing, but not specifically performing on an instrument—I will pick comedy or karaoke or a skit first. I am passionate about music, but more as a listener.

Imagine, though, the person who really loves music and loves performing music, and the hours they put in practicing and arranging and getting gigs. You know people who have day jobs but they still end up playing around town, and are always in one band or another (or four at the same time), because they just can’t let it go. It does not seem unreasonable to me that such a person would be able to appreciate lots and lots of different kinds of music, because they are appreciating it on multiple levels. And it kind of gives me warm fuzzies inside, to know that it’s possible.

This is not to say that I will not be doing any more slagging on anything in this series of music blogs, but I am going to try and open my mind more in my regular listening, and just find new things. Maybe it won’t change my normal listening habits much, but I am at least going to be open to it.

Native American Heritage Month 2011

And now for a brief interruption of my musical exploration to catch up on my reading. Obviously I am running late, but not quite as late as I was running with Black History Month 2011, and with luck I will finish my 2012 Black History Month reading no later than June!

My material for this last round included Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr; 1491 by Charles Mann, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; For the Generations, which was a television special about working with Native American youth so they are in touch with their culture.

I also read some academic articles a friend found for me. One was by James Allen on the LDS Indian Placement Program and was quite good, one was by Vine Deloria Jr on Intellectual Self-Determination and Sovereignty, also good; and then there was one on the writings of Vine Deloria Jr, and I can tell you it was by Troy Richardson, but I would also need to say that it was so clearly a graduate work essay which used many words and never said much. Well, they can’t all be good.

I finished the last book on April 9th (Custer…), but I am currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and I thought that would make a nice supplement to 1491, but it was kind of a tough slog. I was talking to a friend Wednesday though, and while she and her husband both loved it, they spent a year reading it, because you can’t get through it quickly. The information is too dense. So I will keep reading that one, but it is outside the body of this work, and anyway it does cover Native American topics, but not exclusively.

It’s a fairly random sampling, which will make this more of a shaggy dog review with no clear theme, but I was having a hard time choosing, and I can live with this. One thing that makes selecting books difficult is that there is a strong emotional element to these issues, and so there were some books that I considered, but I felt like there was a bias, and that I don’t have enough of a background to know how what to trust.

For example, Custer Died for Your Sins at times veers into polemic, which is fine. Deloria is very intelligent, and an interesting thinker, and generally where it gets more emotional is not in parts where I am trying to learn history. However, there are books about different incidents where I can see that it would be really skewed towards one side or another, and that doesn’t have to rule it out automatically, but I would need to know more.

I think that’s one way where I’m lucky with the Black History Month readings. It’s been going on longer, with the issues more mainstream, so there is a lot of material out there, and there is material on the material. Plus that was kind of my major in college, though more geared towards African Americans in the American West. I feel more confident there.

Incidentally, a note on language: as much as I have this sense that I should use Native American and African America, all of the Native American writers use Indian, and there are cases where black is appropriate and African America is not, so I may switch back and forth on these terms, and there is no intended insult or ignorance.

Back to the actual books, 1491 was great. Again, it is not a quick read, but you learn a lot, and especially you see how many of our common conceptions are wrong. That may actually be a reasonable tie-in to the question of image, which was a factor in the other books, the essays, and even the television special. There is the image that others hold of Indians, but there is also how they view themselves.

For the Generations was about balancing the two. You can be both a skateboarder and a spirit dancer. You can sing contemporary music but have your costume be inspired by your heritage. In the one case she seemed to show her pride by dressing very scantily, but in buckskin and feathers. I’m not sure that is the best expression of cultural pride, but that was really just the one story, and they had many.

One quote that moved me a lot was by Chief Dan George:

“I was born when people loved all nature and spoke to it as though it had a soul. . . .
[But] then the people came. More and more people came. Like a crushing, rushing wave they came, hurling the years aside. And suddenly I found myself a young man in the midst of the twentieth century. I found myself and my people adrift in this new age, not part of it.
We were engulfed by its rushing tide, but only as a captive eddy, going round and round. On little reservations, on plots of land, we floated in a kind of gray unreality, ashamed of our culture that you ridiculed, unsure of who we were or where we were going, uncertain of our grip on the present, weak in our hope of the future. . . .
And now you hold out your hand and you beckon to me to come across the street. Come and integrate, you say. But how can I come? . . . How can I come in dignity? . . . I have no gifts. What is there in my culture you value? My poor treasures you only scorn.
. . . Somehow I must wait. I must delay. I must find myself. I must find my treasure. I must wait until you want something of me, until you need something that is me. Then I can raise my head and say to my wife and family, "Listen, they are calling. They need me. I must go."
Then I can walk across the street and hold my head high, for I will meet you as an equal. I will not scorn you for your seeming gifts, and you will not receive me in pity. Pity I can do without; my manhood I cannot.”

One thing that I got clearly out of my last year’s reading is that while shipping the tribes off to the reservations would have been bad enough, it never ended at that. There were always other moves, so no matter what they had built in terms of homes and schools and farms, it was constantly being lost again. This turns out to have still been an issue at least into the 60’s, not so much with more relocation but with funding issues and planning issues. So if they feel like they do not have gifts to offer, there was a lot of work put into getting them there.

Deloria’s answer is tribalism, that more separation is the answer, not less. My initial thought is to disagree, because he finds differences between the races that I don’t, and I don’t think the cultural differences are so insurmountable. However, I am a white liberal, and I’m expected to think that way. That actually may be the best part of reading “Custer Died for Your Sins”, is being on the receiving end of being judged on race. When I was writing about Jeremy Lin I had to admit that doesn’t come up very often, so I don’t relate to prejudice the same way as someone who has to deal with it all the time. Maybe it’s good for me to feel that sometimes. And he does judge.

(Also, he and Mann both leave you with not the highest impression of anthropologists and social scientists, but not in the same way. Academia is really cutthroat, no matter how boring it looks.)

Sherman Alexie’s book was the one that affected me the most personally. It is semi-autobiographical fiction, and I don’t know what specific details are real or changed, but it is emotionally very real, and it was devastating. And it was funny too, and somewhat optimistic, but I kept crying, and wishing things were different.

And this may be where more tribalism is the answer. In the book, Junior is advised by a teacher to get off the reservation, because there is no hope there, so he transfers to a school where most of the students end up attending college. He is still living on the reservation, but he is truly entering a different world, which is why he is a part-time Indian.

He initially encounters a lot of prejudice, but many of those people become friends, and you know that he will be able to go to college and graduate and have a future, just like the author did in real life. However, that leaves everyone else on the reservation with no hope.

One of the points made by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow is that people use black exceptionalism as proof that the system works. Obama became president, Denzel and Halle won their Oscars, there have been two Supreme Court justices, so obviously anyone can succeed, when really the deck is stacked against most.

Maybe there is a similar issue with Indian exceptionalism, except that they are so invisible most of the time that people don’t even worry about it. It may be more valuable to bring hope to the reservations than to wish for everyone to find it outside.

That sounds like I am advocating separation there, and no, I still don’t feel good about that. In addition, I think now we are moving into poor people exceptionalism, where if some poor people can finish school and find good jobs, than any can. Ultimately we need to build a society where anyone can do well, rather than one where the haves just assume the have-nots are lazy.

Really, I did not come away with any answers. I still just have this commitment to at least trying to find out what the questions are, and I believe that looking outside of my personal experience twice a year is not too much of a burden, even if I will always be running late. No, this November I will start on time, and the 2012 Native American reading will be completed in 2012.

Don’t forget the lyrics

One key inspiration for my musical odyssey started when I was carpooling to work. One of the great annoyances of that time period was the radio.

It was the K103 morning show, and I did not really have a problem with the crew--they seemed like nice enough people, and the Stump the Jock guy was clearly pretty knowledgeable--but so much of the music was just so crappy.

It wasn't all bad. They played a fair amount of Pink and the song you had to guess was often from the eighties, and decent, and then they would play the rest of it, so it could have been worse. In general, though, the music was mediocre, and played over and over again.

Where I would sometimes resent the crew is when they would say good things about the music. Sarah Bareilles is so rebellious! Taylor Swift packs so much meaning into her lines! No, and NO!

Refusing to comply with the requests of the people who are helping you make money, and silently ignoring advice while thinking bad thoughts about the person giving it, isn’t really all that hardcore. As for depth and meaning in Taylor Swift, where do I start?

You know a song that impresses me in its layers of meaning? Coldplay's “Viva La Vida”. First of all, they set up rhymes that are not completed, so they can move on to the next phrase while you still hear the phrase that was not completed.

For some reason I can't explain
Once you were gone it was never--

And they say "Never an honest word", but "Never the same" is still suggested, because that would be the logical rhyme. So it is conveyed both that the loss of the person changes things irrevocably, and that there is also a loss of honesty, sincerity, and possibly even comprehension of this new order of things.

People ask "But who is it talking about?" looking for someone specific who literally went through all of those things. That’s not the point. Usually the most powerful rulers end up dead when deposed, rather than sweeping the streets, but there are wealthy people who can end up in menial jobs, and fill that role. Probably the closest thing you have to a specific reference is that "Seas would rise when I gave the word" kind of sounds like a reference to Canute, only he gave the word for the sea not to rise and it did anyway, which was his point.

Anyway, what we clearly have instead of something literal is image after image that evokes an emotion of having lost and been overturned. The images are more for political power, but for someone who has felt in control of their life, and found out they weren't, or someone who has lost innocence, the emotions work. It can have emotional resonance for anyone.

I'm not saying that there are not many people who can relate to the line "And there's a drawer of my things at your place", but there’s not much poetry. Isn't the point of music that you don't have to be that literal? Music is exactly where it is appropriate to speak of the pompatus of love and not provide an answer key. I have as much fun looking for the symbolism in American Pie as anyone, but it's mental. The emotional resonance of the song does not change if you know that Bob Dylan had a jacket that looked like James Dean's.

And yet with saying all of that, I also have to acknowledge that I’m a punk rock fan, where the lyrics are often quite simple, and I’m not that big a Coldplay fan. I listen to “Viva La Vida” and sometimes “Talk”, and that’s about it. I do remember a quote from Chris Martin though, where he was saying something along the lines of they weren’t really going to get any bigger, so the goal that made sense was to try and be better—better at their instruments, work at the music harder—and work that way.

Taylor Swift is cute, and she writes her own songs and plays guitar and so right there she is way ahead of a lot of tween idols. At the same time, she comes off as a little shrill to me (Is that what they call “pitchy?”), so I think maybe some voice lessons aren’t completely uncalled for. Though also, that means she is probably not using Autotune. And sure, she is young, so there may be a limit to what sort of depth you can expect, but can’t you try a little harder? Yes still, she really tries harder than a lot of them, and still I reject her.

And this strikes at the heart of why my music post keeps expanding—there are just so many contradictions, and so much of it is not logical. We will keep exploring that.

Exposure

As I explained yesterday, I always want to know more about music, and sometimes I realize that there is a lot I am missing. Without going into the why and how of that, I am currently working on three things to broaden my knowledge of music.

The first one is that while I am scornful of music popular with tweens, coming from people with Disney shows or from American Idol, or where you might use the terms “pop princess” or “boy band”, it is not really an informed scorn. At times I have thought that I should force myself to listen to some of these things, so I could earn my disdain. Still, the thought of doing so was kind of horrible, and Maria was worried that it might leave me suicidal (whether from aggravation or from discovering I liked it; either way).

In addition, recently Greg Glover (94.7 Alternative Portland) pulled his 8 at 8 from Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of all time. (It was when Jim Marshall, creator of the Marshall Stack amplifiers, died). I had not previously known of the existence of such a list, but that seemed like something worth checking out, especially since I have been remembering how much I love guitar lately. If I balanced listening to the dreck with classic guitar, maybe it would be okay.

Well, there are downsides and upsides. The downside is that I hate a lot of these guitar songs. I suspect the list is questionable, based on the comments if nothing else, so I will listen to the songs mentioned in the comments too. Still, it’s disappointing when you think you are going to rock out, and then you are just gritting your teeth. And some of these songs are so long! If you’re going to suck, at least get it over with.

On the plus side, when music does not really work for me, I tend not to retain it. I just have this vague sense of generic noise, and I can remember thoughts I had during it, so I know I was taking it in, but it did not stay. This is helpful for both the guitar side and the auto-tuned side (and seriously, do they all do that now?).

Also, remember I am getting really into My Chemical Romance now, and since our incentives came through (it’s like a bonus, but they don’t want to call it that), I bought their last three CDs and Pencey Prep’s CD (that’s Frank Iero’s previous band). I did not get their debut CD yet, because it was kind of expensive, but I will either buy it electronically or find it somewhere else. Without the Watchmen CD, I don’t have “Desolation Row” either, but one of the CDs got me a credit for one electronic download, so that will work out perfectly.

Now, bad music leaves me quickly, but music that I respond to haunts me, so my tendency is to listen to it over and over again until I have it memorized, looking up the lyrics if I can’t make them out, and just totally having them become a part of me so I can hear it any time I want to. (Yes, an MP3 player would probably be easier, and I will open up mine at some point, but I think I will still do this, more proof that I lean more towards OCD than ADD.)

Anyway, getting four CDs at once gives me a lot to listen to that I am responding to well, so I do have some balance there, and I don’t think that I will need to hurt myself. Also, I don’t think that I will abandon either of the annoying projects, because I am pretty stubborn. I’ll write more about all of those as I get closer to completion. I have to pace myself.

I should be fine, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on me. If I seem like I might be a danger to myself or others, pump in some Ramones. That usually fixes things.

Musical Journey

Lately I have been thinking a lot about music and talking a lot about music, reading about it, and definitely listening to a lot of music. I had started one blog post a while ago, but it was just getting too long and rambling too much. I had at one point thought I could divide it in two, but new heads kept sprouting up. I’m going to try and do a series of short posts, and see how it goes.

First of all, let me give you my qualifications. I took piano for a few years (6th through 10th grade, I think), and was okay at it but not gifted. I probably should have started earlier, and gotten those practice habits ingrained sooner. I learned shortly after graduating from high school that no matter how much I practiced I could not accompany people singing in any but the most rudimentary manner.

In 9th grade some friends and I started a band, sort of. Instead of doing the logical thing and having me play keyboard, I was going to be on guitar and vocals. I did not know at this time about all of the vocalists who have to give up guitar because doing the two simultaneously is too hard. It did not really matter, because I have no aptitude for guitar, and if you took Beginning Guitar at Five Oaks in 1987, you know it. (And at one point you probably tuned my guitar for me, because I never got the hang of that.) I peaked at picking out Ode to Joy. I know I have no credibility, because I never even tried Smoke on the Water.

Just before 11th grade I bought a drum kit, and was too self-conscious about how noisy they were. I did have some aptitude, but obviously the wrong personality. The other drummers I know are proud when a noise complaint gets called in. What I should have been doing was practicing on cushions, but I did not know about that option until later.

During this time I wrote music on a regular basis, but I always had to keep the tunes in my head because the ear issue that keeps me from being able to tune my guitar also keeps me from being able to figure out which notes on the keyboard match the ones in my head. I did record (portable tape recorder in the bathroom) a couple of songs I wrote in French for extra credit. Otherwise, I guess I’m just lucky to have a pretty good memory. This is actually the part that I would most want to fix, though getting back into piano would probably make sense.

So basically, I do not have any credentials. This is important, because I am unlikely to write anything that cannot be understood by a novice.

What I do have is a lot of passion for the subject. I am constantly amazed by how much I love rock, and other types of music, how much it means to me, and also how much I want to know about it.

I have written before that I know I am not a tech geek because even though there are some things that I can fix, I just get irritated by them, and the real geeks I know get excited when something needs troubleshooting.

I might be a music geek. For example, the other day I was listening to “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance. There was a segment in there that reminded me a little bit of a segment in “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, so I had to listen to that, but also it is reminiscent of Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner, so I had to listen to both of those, and then I wonder if the notes that reminded me of Twisted Sister came from the Geldof “Desolation Row”, and then since I was listening to 80’s rock and I brought up some Quiet Riot and Slade and I live for stuff like that. There are some Cars keyboard bits that really remind me of Iggy Pop, which is cool because Rik Ocasek’s son Christopher did a cover of Pop’s “Real Wild Child”. These things are probably silly, and I could be hearing things, but I love that.

However, I realize there is also a lot that I don’t know about music, and some of what I have been thinking about now relates to educating myself more about music, which has not been a totally happy experience, but I’ll explain that tomorrow. For now, just put another dime in the jukebox.

Letters to Aaron

Occasionally when I am writing about writing, I mention letter writing, and there is more story there, and I feel like I might as well explain that one now. Yes, I have a prison pen pal;no, it is not like that.

My sisters and I met Aaron at church. We got along well, but we did not get particularly close. At the same time, with our tendency to look out for people who might need someone extra looking out for them, he was one of them. We left him an Easter basket anonymously once, and we would remember his birthday, and once they gave him a ride home. (I was doing something else at the time.) He was always really appreciative and grateful, and glad to see us, but we didn't see him all the time, and we didn't really socialize outside of church.

We don't always know why we feel like we need to keep an eye on someone, but with Aaron there were some pretty good indicators. He was the only member in his family, and they were on the other side of the country, so he did not necessarily have the greatest support system to start with, he had money and employment concerns, and he had a bit of an attitude about racial issues. Aaron is black, and besides feeling isolated at times by the lack of diversity in the area, and having some anger about prejudice and some of those common issues (all of which is completely understandable), it often seemed that he found a conflict between honoring his racial heritage and honoring his religious beliefs.

He did end up in jail for about a month one year, and by the time we found out what had happened (we knew something was wrong, but were not sure what), he was out, and our card was returned.

Right around Christmas 2010 I was leaving to go visit my mother in the hospital (knee surgery), and the caller ID flashed on the television and said Washington County Jail, but it hung up after one ring. I knew it was Aaron. I worried about it all the way to see my mother and back, but when I got home I got confirmation, as I had learned a little about navigating inmate information from the last go-around.

I don't really want to get into the details of the criminal case at this time, but basically desperation for money caused him to do something stupid. It was not a malicious action, but he did know better and he should have chosen differently, and no one's denying that. At that point, all we could do was be supportive.

So we started writing. While he was in Washington County Jail, pre-sentencing, we could only send postcards, but I think it's been about a year now that we have been able to do actual letters once he was transferred into the state system. (I have also gotten pretty good and navigating prison mail rules.)

The entire household takes an interest in him, and Julie and Maria are pretty good about sending cards and postcards, as well as getting cards for Mom to send. Most of the actual letter writing ends up being me. This can be largely attributed to my always having more to say.

In terms of lonely single women writing to convicts that they have only read about, I don't think that's really healthy for anyone, but if every prisoner could have loved ones writing to them I think it would do a lot of good. There is a lot of loneliness and isolation and boredom. It's not supposed to be pleasant, but if we are thinking about what kind of person we want to have coming back out, the punishment should not rule out growth. There are a lot of different programs that you read about and whether it is a GED program or training troubled dogs, it seems like the article always mentions that it decreases the rate of recidivism. Maybe a lot of them just need something to care about.

I know we are good for Aaron, not just for the letters but also for the books. He had shared "Losing My Cool" around Washington County, and now everyone is Snake River is excited to read "The New Jim Crow". I've got to say, I feel really good about that.

Writing to him has also been really good for me. First of all, there has definitely been improvement in my discipline for that. As much as I need to write, it can be hard to make time, and I have never been a good letter writer in terms of frequency (though when I do write the letters are awesome). I am horrible about writing to my sponsored children, and I volunteered to write to a missionary a few months ago, and I'm just embarrassed about my frequency there. I have been pretty good about writing to Aaron though. How can I not be, when it means so much to him? (I think this is the point where I need to clarify that this is not romantic in any way. I don't think it sounds that way, but just in case, I he's like a younger brother.)

In addition, it has made me better about journal writing, because those letters are a big part of my journal. I will at some point update the travel blog, but currently the only reason I have recorded anything about our Mexico vacation is because I wrote to him about it. (And I wrote in exhaustive detail, knowing that long letters are better.)

Also, sometimes I end up writing to him about something first, and then blogging about it, and so I've had multiple runs at organizing my thoughts before they go out to the public. And sometimes I send him blog posts, if they relate. Oddly, he just asked about something that I had journaled about extensively, and will probably blog about, but by the time you get it, I will have written about it twice, and that should make it better.

I remember that first time, when he was only in for a month, but also there were two girls in the ward who had severe illnesses, and I started thinking about Matthew 25:35-36:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

It had never seemed so literal to me. Usually we think we are dealing with emotional and social needs, but there right in our ward there were members sick and in prison, and it made me wonder if there was anyone hungry or in need of clothes.

We were already trying to keep our eyes and our hearts open, but there is always room for more, and there are great gifts in it too. I am a better person for my association with Aaron.

Creative me

As promised, more on what I have been up to. First of all, you may have noticed that I am actually starting to blog on a regular basis now. I had gone quite a while where I kept meaning too, but ended up doing more journal writing or letter writing, because there were things I needed to write about privately before I could do it publicly. I thought the big blogging catch-up would be what would free up my story and screenplay writing self, but I need to catch up in the journal to free my blogging self.

One thing that I am doing differently now is that I am writing multiple posts at once, and so I don’t necessarily have to blog daily to post daily. It was initially mainly a decision based on time, but it has been working well in terms of having some time between writing and posting so that I can take a second look. If there are thoughts that were not clearly expressed, I can clean it up, and if I am running on so long that it makes the post less readable, I can separate it into multiple posts, like yesterday and today (I’m working on this post on music that has this hydra thing going on).

I am happy to say that it is working, and I am getting flooded with ideas for things to work on. A lot of it is more development on previously existing ideas, but I know things that I am going to do for screen plays and for television pilots and even old songs are coming back to me that I will work with at some point. It feels very exciting, and although I am not done with the blogging, I have started one new screenplay, sort of.

Now I generally don’t like to mix up different projects, and with a writer’s normal tendency towards procrastination and Attention Deficit Disorder, it is important to complete one project before starting the next one, or have some sort of framework to prevent scattering. In this case (blogging versus screenwriting), I don’t worry about it because they are different types of writing that I do at different times.
What about that “sort of”? You know, it’s a little embarrassing, and it is not anything that I will try and sell or share with anyone, but I am going to write about it happening, because it allows us to address some other things.

First of all, it started with some music videos. I am obsessing over My Chemical Romance right now, which will probably get its own post at some point, but they have a couple of videos (Na Na Na and Sing) that are very cool on their own, and very modern, and at the same time kind of reminiscent of the 80’s where many videos were set during post-apocalyptic dystopian futures with oppressive regimes (not always all at the same time, but sometimes).

I would often add plot and details to videos then. I would take off on movies and television episodes too, but music videos were ideal because they were short features, where there was a lot of room for embellishment, and then you have whatever emotional impact the music adds, and they were something I loved and watched a lot of.

I don’t know if it was the decline of the videos that caused the video channels to move towards other kinds of content, or as the channels moved more towards “reality” programming then labels put less resources into videos. Maybe the decline is because the music quality declined. Regardless, finding cool videos again is a plus, and MCR really does put a lot of effort into videos, and they come up with compelling ones. For these two, I found my mind returning to these videos again and again, turning them over and filling things out, and there was a story.

Like any person who does not want to be a narcissist, my first thought was why am I even doing this? They don’t need it. They’ve got their own material, and I think there might be a graphic novel coming out. But the thoughts keep coming, and it’s not like it’s hurting anyone so I was just going with it.

The next question to arise, which was more like a series of questions, is why was I taking it in the direction that I was taking it? I may blog about that at some point, but that part is quite personal, and still pretty raw. Basically there was this nagging why, and it led to a lot of journal writing and soul searching and some mourning, actually, but I dealt with some things that I apparently needed to deal with.

Yesterday I was writing about general creativity, and what I said there could be true for anyone. This one may just be me. Not just my career hopes, but my mental and emotional wellness and a lot of my recreation comes from this time I spend with the page. Months ago I wrote about how I cannot pass by a path or trail without wanting to go down it. Writing is like that for me, I guess, where I need to see how things turn out, and what else happens if one thing happens. That also leads me down inner paths. Why do I feel that way? How did I get this way? And off I go.

Having already had some major breakthroughs, it tends to beg the question of whether I now need to actually write the story out, or if I am done with it. I think I have more to learn from this material, so I’m sticking with it. Maybe this will be a good transition into getting at some of the other writing projects that I actually do hope to sell or produce. It has been fifteen months since I have even been actively using screenwriting software. There are technical skills to that, and there is skill to balancing a scene between multiple characters, and keeping the right pace.

There is actually a lot of good ground here, because we have different types of action scenes (fist-fighting, car chase, building raid) on different scales, family scenes, flashbacks, seemingly unstoppable villains (seriously, I have no idea how the good guys are going to eventually win; it’s really improbable), a love story, and a wide variety of things that I haven’t been dealing with since I became steadily employed. (Unemployment was scary and depressing, but I was really productive.)

So far I only have about nineteen pages down, but just to start with I have already had to deliver some exposition, and make it not clunky, and do that while you have three of the five people in the scene regaining consciousness, and not all at the same time.

Best of all, I am excited about it, and can’t wait to get back to it and write more. It feels good to be in the middle of something again, even if right now I am being derivative and unproductive. I mean, I’m basically writing fan fiction (except that none of them will be sleeping together). And yet that is almost exactly the point.

I have accidentally stumbled upon across a small amount of fan fiction on the internet (not for MCR, but for different video games and shows and actors). It’s probably not enough to consider myself an expert, but I’m comfortable with not doing anymore research. Anyway, the hang-ups of the writer clearly come through. Whether it is misogyny, or a need to be special, or a need to have someone stick up for you, you learn a lot about the writer without even having to read that much (certainly more than you would learn about the subject). Actually, that can be pretty true of other types of writing as well.

I absolutely don’t mean to denigrate any of these writers (except maybe the misogynists). Those are real issues, with real pain attached, and if the writing the story provides some comfort or relief then that’s great. Even better, though, might be to realize there is a hang-up, and that maybe there does not need to be.

That’s what I am going for. There is definitely the pure joy of writing (and the compulsion to do it), but also there is that search to polish my rough spots, till my weedy patches, and pull the skeletons out of my closet so they can bleach in the sun. It’s therapy with a rock and roll soundtrack—literally.

Creation

I have thinking a lot about creativity lately, for reasons which I will blog about in the next post. For now I want to write about creativity itself.

First of all, it is just an amazing thing for me how things grow. An idea comes, and often it does not even feel like you are making it up so much as that you are discovering it. There are things that feel right and that don’t. Often there are things that you want to happen or expect to happen, and then they simply do not work, so it changes everything, but then the change works and that brings a new satisfaction.

I know many people who do not consider themselves creative they are not inventing anything, but creation is not making up; it’s just making. It doesn’t matter if no one else has ever done it, or ever could.

Creation means that you are putting something new into the world. We think of stories and paintings and songs, but it can also be a musical performance, or a deck, or a batch of cookies. It could even be planning a new experience that creates a memory for someone.

To make something that is different (what people think of as creativity) might be more accurately called innovation, and it certainly has its place. The funny thing is that practicing creation makes you better at innovation. Now you know how something normally goes so you have a better idea of how it can be different. But even if all you do is make the same batch of cookies over and over again, cookies are good!

I used to really look down on latch hooking. I didn’t care for the texture, or the usual colors and patterns, and I felt like they were absolutely useless. I would not want to walk on one or hang one on the wall. Meanwhile, I was doing these embroidery patterns, which were way more practical because I would embroider pillow cases as wedding gifts. That way the newlyweds would have some nice pillowcases that did not match their bedroom set and were honestly kind of small for the size of pillows most people use. And I was not making anything up, because I was following patterns in kits.

However, I liked doing it. I thought they were pretty, and I liked watching it go from just a blue on white pattern to filling out with different colors and textures. Watching that progress was satisfying to me. So if you can get that with latch hook or macramé or paint by numbers, go with that. Or plant a garden or make a scrapbook, but put something there that was not there before, something that you find to be good. On your own level, you are doing the work of God.

Social Anxiety

Back around my birthday I posted about some goal-setting I had done, but I did not write much about the actual celebration. I had been feeling like I was ready for karaoke again, so going out the Saturday before my birthday (a Tuesday) made sense. I did not make it specifically for my birthday, but focused on getting schoolmates together, because those are good nights, and I did not want to focus on the birthday too much. I was going to Mexico for that.

Anyway, it was a pretty good night. Those who came had a good time, I think. Only two of us sang, both singing twice, but there were plenty of people from other groups singing, so there was always plenty going on, and if people can have a good time at karaoke without getting up there, cool. Also, I finally did attempt “I’m not okay”, and it went pretty well, though I did not anticipate how dizzy the head-banging part would make me, and I nearly fell getting back to my chair. Since I don’t drink, that may be the closest I have come to seeing how karaoke feels for a lot of people.

There were more people who wanted to come, but there was snow coming in, and especially for the people who lived farther away it was a concern. Now, this post is not in any way going after people who did not come due to weather or other commitments or a hatred for amateur rock stars—this is just a peek into my twisted little mind.

I love getting people together. I often have ideas for things that I think would make good get-togethers. Creating these get-togethers just happens to put me at my most neurotic.
Traditionally this is what happens with a Facebook invitation. Response options are Attend, Maybe, No, and to not respond at all. People who are not sure that they can attend but want to will put Maybe, or possibly not respond, and they do not come. People who fully want to attend will say they are, but you will not get all of these, because things come up. I do this too, and actually, it has never been a reflection on the event.

Bearing this in mind, I probably should not feel so much dread when positive RSVPs are slow to come, but it does not work that way. I always worry that the event will be a total disaster. No one will come except maybe one person, and then they will have a bad time, and I will have given them a sucky time because I had delusions of grandeur that people would actually want to spend time with me.

The thing is, once you are the organizer, you have an obligation. You can’t show up, realize you are a dismal failure, and then back away slowly, because if that one person who was foolish enough to come shows up twenty minutes late, and you are not there, your social transgressions have just been compounded.

Because of this, I have hung out by myself in a park for about an hour, but then one family did show up, and then another, and fortunately they had children of similar ages and we all got along, but it was a little stressful. And actually, there were only three people, including me, at the previous karaoke night that I organized. Again, it was not awful, but it doesn’t leave you feeling like a homecoming queen either.

(Speaking of birthday parties, I had them in 4th grade and in 9th grade, and in both cases most of the girls came, but only one boy each, leaving them in somewhat awkward positions. This is why only girls were invited to my 16th birthday party.)

This will generally lead to doubts about whether people even really want me at their events or they are just inviting me because they are being nice, and hoping that I either won’t make it or there will be enough other people there that it won’t matter. This has nothing to do with how anyone has treated me. It’s just me. (I realize this is pathetic—knowing when I am pathetic is one of my better qualities.)

This is why I really prefer to let other people organize social events, and will defer to others as often as possible (though this often means that things ended up occurring in locations and at times that are not conveniently accessible via public transportation, especially for a female traveling alone).

I also know, though, that at some point it will be my turn again, and I will do it again. I will plan, and try to accommodate, and I will completely stress out again, but I’ll do it. I don’t think I have a single regret that didn’t have something to do with fear. I don’t feel like accumulating any more.

A-Twitter

I have been on Twitter since February 6th. It’s been around since 2006, so that seemed like the right amount of lead time.

Seriously, from the start I thought Twitter sounded really stupid, and had no intention of ever getting on it. I was brought to it by the TV show Grimm.

As I would read posts in the Television Without Pity Forum, a lot of people would post things from Twitter, mainly from David Giuntoli (Nick), Sasha Roiz (Renard), and Reggie Lee (Wu). The posts were interesting and funny, and the show didn’t really seem to have a strong presence on Facebook, which is where I usually follow stuff that I like, so I finally decided to sign up.

Initially, I thought I would just follow the people from the show, because that’s why I was over there, but they keep prompting you for more until you have at least 14, I think, and then they want you to make a post. What had I had gotten myself into?

I have adjusted somewhat. First of all, I did end up finding other things I was interested in, and while the interplay between the Grimm cast is fun, I think maybe where Twitter has been most useful for me is in following the bands I want to see and my favorite political writers. Not everyone is Facebook. A lot of musicians have a strong MySpace presence, but MySpace bugs me in a way that Twitter does not.

So, sure, I have these exotic travel goals, but at the same time I could just decide that if the Gin Blossoms still aren’t coming to Portland, maybe I will just go see them in Indiana or something. At least I am getting updates.

For the political, I love Joe Conason (The National Memo), but the Oregonian hardly ever runs his work, and he posts good stuff, so following him works well for me. Krugman, Kristof, and Pitts are pretty good for posting their own columns on Facebook, but Krugman and Kristof also post a lot of interesting other things on Twitter. I had to un-follow David Sirota—he just tweets too much. I follow a few who will go through phases where you get twenty tweets in a few hours, but not all the time.

Ultimately, it seems like Twitter works better for people with public personas, while Facebook works better with friends. I don’t have a problem with that, so I am finding something useful in a new (for me) aspect of social networking. There have been a few issues. One is my username, sultryglebe.

Actually, it comes from an old hymn, The Lord My Pasture Will Prepare. We sang it in church, and the phrase stuck out to me, and I decided that the next time I needed a username, that was it. (Incidentally, a glebe is a cultivated plot of land, often owned by the church. I had assumed it was something more boggy, but that’s what dictionaries are for.)

I would occasionally attract new followers who, based on profile pictures and linked URLs, may have thought that the “sultry” part was saying something about me that it really wasn’t. That felt awkward, and then they would un-follow me a few days later, which felt kind of bad. I had not originally intended to accumulate followers, but then when I did I didn’t want to disappoint them.

I didn’t originally even intend to post that much, but then I felt like I should be doing something with it. So I would make posts, and then do I use the same thing for my Facebook status update? Okay, you can have that automatically post to Facebook, but then if you are doing something with the hash tags (I have participated in a couple of contests) it looks weird, but it still posts automatically because that’s your setting.

I was kind of thinking to just not post anything or be followed, and only use it for following, but then sometimes I can’t resist. Also, because I have been thinking about self-promotion as I work toward becoming a professional writer, as opposed to amateur, well, that would be a public persona. Could Twitter be helpful there?

Anyway, I’m trying something new. First of all, I have unlinked Facebook and Twitter. This is mainly because I am starting to put my blog posts on Twitter, and they already get posted on Facebook via Networked Blogs. With the URL, I will do a hash tag of the relevant topic, mainly after checking to see if it is relevant.
I guess the goal is to increase my blog readership, but it’s okay if it doesn’t.

Maybe my real goal is just to see if this is something that works, and then I will know something that I didn’t before. See, now I don’t just learn things by reading—I also conduct experiments! (I will be using Google Analytics to see page hits and referral sites, to see if anyone is linking from Twitter.)

And maybe I do want to attract more readers. I do feel that I have something to say.

I don’t know if I will do this with every single blog post yet, or how long I will do it. It’s kind of a work in progress, much like me.

Reinstating Ron Frashour

I thought I was going to take a break from politics for a while, but apparently I was wrong. However, this is local, and not largely theoretical, so it is a little different. It’s also a touchy issue, so if you are going to read, please read the whole thing, and give me a chance.

There was an article in the Saturday Oregonian about an arbitrator ruling that Ron Frashour should be rehired and granted back pay. I had not agreed with his firing, so I was glad that he won his case, but at the same time there was the mayor, Sam Adams, vowing to appeal.

I actually wrote a letter to the editor with my views, but it did not get published (no big deal—they get a lot of submissions), but then the Oregonian editorial was so off-base that I had to express something, and since the letter did not work I am using the blog.

Back to my confirmation bias issue, I think sometimes people can’t see a side because of the emotional impact. What happened was so wrong, it leaves no room for them to think of anything else, like whether the person being punished for the horrible crime is really the one who did it. So let me be clear that Aaron Campbell should not be dead, and it is awful that he is dead, and this should not have happened.

But it has also always been clear from reading about the investigation that what happened was not the fault of a single person. I don’t even mean the fault of a despondent person deciding that the best way to end the pain was to get the police involved. The issue is that there was a scene of confusion with no clear communication between the various officers and too much noise to facilitate understanding of the scene.

What was also clear in the reading is that this was not a coincidence. Other people involved in police training for dealing with the mentally ill and suicidal have said that they take experienced officers and run them through specialized training where they become part of a special response team, and those responders are the ones sent to the scene when this kind of situation comes up.

Here (at least at the time), this training occurred for every new officer as part of the general training. Everyone gets the training, but they get it at a time when all of the information is new, and no one specializes. The local response to that was that the officers followed their training, with no defense of the training methods.

It was a scene of confusion. A negotiator was texting with Campbell and got him to agree to come out. Apparently he exited with his hands on his head. Another officer wanted the hands over the head, so shot him with beanbag rounds. Campbell reached for his back, probably just as a reflex to being hit, and Frashour interpreted that as going for a gun and shot fatally.

If there had been good communication between the various groups, and everyone knew what was going on, then maybe things would have not transpired that way. As it was, the beanbag round seems to be the real issue. Yes, on its own it is nonlethal, but it set off a reaction that led to another reaction, and it seems unnecessary. Is it really so awful for the hands to be on the head instead of over the head? Maybe you want to make an adjustment, but is that the way?

Maybe, just as there was too much going on that night for anyone to hear clearly, we have that issue with the aftermath. A lot of the concerns are racial, because too many people of color have been shot by the police. That is a concern, and there probably is racism in the bureau among individual members, even if not in any kind of systemic way. That is bad, and difficult to address.

However, there is a much easier to identify issue with mental illness. Aaron Campbell and Keaton Otis were both black, but they were also, respectively, suicidal and mentally ill. Jose Mejia Poot was mentally ill. James Chasse was mentally ill. Jack Dale Collins was mentally ill. Actually, Mental Health Portland has a whole list. In some of those cases the death seems unavoidable, but in many cases a specialized response team of seasoned officers can make a world of difference.

The original article said the bureau has made some changes since the initial incident, though it did not specify what they were. It seems clear to me, though, that the issue is not the fault of any individual officer, but rather a collective failure. That can be not just a teachable moment, but a transformative moment, where we decide we are going to do this better. We are going to update our training, improve our response, and strengthen our safety net for the mentally ill. Nope, we’re going to fire the one guy.

This is the part in the editorial that appalled me: First of all, in the middle, it says this: “What the jury found was an appalling lack of communication among officers on the scene and that Frashour, by all accounts a decent and hardworking cop, was operating in an information void.” Everything is leading towards a systemic failure, not an individual failure, unless maybe you are saying that Frashour has sole or at least greater responsibility for the information void. Then it concludes this way, “That's why, unfortunate as it was, an otherwise good cop had to be fired, and that's why Reese and Portland Mayor Sam Adams must counter every challenge that would undo the firing. The credibility of the police force, and the city, depends on it.”

How does that follow? How do you put someone in a terrible situation where things are likely to go wrong, and then decide reason it went wrong is his fault? Yes, his step was the final step in the chain of confusion, but it was not the only step.
I feel like Frashour is being used as a sacrificial lamb the make people feel better, and Adams does not have enough of a track record of integrity or non-political decisions to have any credibility on that front. The credibility of the police force and the city is not at stake based on whether Frashour has a job or not. Their credibility comes from whether you can believe the things they say, and why they say them, and believing that they are committed to a well-run city that works well for its citizens over maintaining a positive image.

Unions can hurt their cause at times, like when they try and defend the jobs of the bus driver who seems to have at least one complaint for every week she works, or the cop who is having sex on the job, but this time they are exactly right. This is a time to defend.

I absolutely agree with the protesters that there are problems and they need to be addressed, but a false sense of security is in no one’s best interest, and that is all that can be accomplished by firing someone who even his detractors call a good cop.

A Cynical Look at Shameless Self-Promotion

Not too long ago, we kept seeing commercials for a new book, “Deep into the Heart of a Rose”. It was odd to see a commercial for a book in general. I usually only see them for James Patterson, and they never make me feel any desire to read the book, so I kind of doubt the wisdom of the whole television commercial for book concept.

This commercial was interesting because it was so odd. Patterson is a really popular author (I think), so you know how he gets the budget. Not only was this from an unknown (GT Denny), but it was in the fantasy genre, which a lot of people tend to avoid. That could be more of a reason to try something different, but it could also be a reason that the enterprise is more likely to fail.

I ended up being intrigued. I did read a lot of fantasy back in the day (Pern, Xanth, Shannara, and the Belgariad mainly, and of course Narnia and Middle Earth), but at the same time there was just something a little cloying about the text that was repeated, and yet it was so odd just that the commercial existed.

I went to Goodreads looking for more information, but initially there wasn’t a lot. There were four reviews. Two were from the author, using different but similar screen names. One was just a rating, but the one that had a quote merely said “The book I have read more than any other.”

Well that makes no sense at all. It’s a sentence fragment implying multiple readings for a book that hasn’t really been out long enough for years of history with going back to it, and with no real attempt to hide the identity by a cleverly-disguised screen name. What is it even saying? I spent a lot of time proofreading after the initial writing? I’m not much of a reader but I read this one twice? There aren’t even any complimentary adjectives!

Of the other two reviews, without proof, I got the distinct impression that one was from the person who did the artwork for the commercial, and then the other was a friend.

There is more information out there now, but the fascinating part is how many of them mention reading the book because they won it. That’s not to say that they don’t like it, because many of them are very positive. There are also some online reviews on other sites which are positive. Still, I feel like I would find it too whimsical, if for no other reason that the main characters are named Edward T. Cozzlebottom and Ezmerelda Wimbish. Between that, “the book I have read more than any other”, and the text of the letter that was read in the commercial, my alarm bells for annoyance keep going off. The whole thing just screams "twee".

I still remain fascinated by the whole campaign. I can’t really find anything on the publisher, Night Watch Fiction, so I can’t help wondering, did this guy just self-publish, and finance the commercial and contests—anything to get his book out there? And if so, will it work? The fact that I don’t want to read it should not be a factor. My aversion to Twilight hasn’t made a dent in book or ticket sales.

It’s interesting to me because even though I am in a writing phase now, I will soon be entering a phase where I really need to get someone to invest in me. Ideally this will involve acquiring an agent who is well-connected and aggressive and who believes in me, and then they can do the selling, because that is not my talent.
Even assuming that can work though, it still requires approaching agents and trying to convince them that ten percent of what I can produce is worthwhile.

First of all, I don't want to be bugging my friends for everything. I refuse to attend any "party" that's a selling event, and I love and admire many people who have become evangelical about their businesses, but I just can't.

Also, I do not do well at any kind of sales. I hate asking people for things, and selling myself is even worse because then I have to believe in myself, which I kind of do, in some things, but not everything.

So I am fascinated because there are things that I will need to do that appall me, and I don't know how they will turn out. I will have to figure something out, because I don’t have the budget for a television commercial.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

In keeping with my habit of dredging up old news, one of the most disturbing aspects for me during the debt ceiling debate was the insistence, primarily from Republicans, on not hashing over who was to blame for the financial crisis. Sure, it sounds like an attempt to stay productive, rather than wasting time on the blame game, but even if the "who" was not important, the "how" and "why" could be really relevant, rather than forgetting the past so it could be repeated.

What bothers me, and it comes up on many topics, over and over, is the lack, not merely of intellect, but of intellectual honesty. People will say things that are, if not completely false, utterly twisted, and they don't care. I don't know if the mental process is a decision that the ends justify the means, or that it's close enough, or there is actual delusion. It may be a mix. For example, I don't think that Sarah Palin ever really believed in death panels, but I think that some of her listeners did. (And maybe I'm giving Palin too much credit.)

Anyway, one of the things that comes up a lot may actually be due to a lack of understanding, so I thought that I would take a crack at it. President Obama is not a socialist. The Affordable Care Act is not an expression of socialism. The Liberals are not socialists.

I realize I am going to be oversimplifying here, but even under the best of circumstances I tend to go on too long, so I think oversimplification is acceptable. Here we go.

Socialism derives its name from the means of production (farms, factories, etc.) being socially owned. This could mean that they are government-controlled, union-controlled, or maybe controlled by various collectives, but it is opposed to capitalism where generally speaking the capitalists (the people who have the money) control the means of production, and therefore are hiring and selling to the masses. (Again, this is super-simplified, but this is not even the important part, so just deal with it.)

The way this happens is that the masses rise up against their oppressors, be they government or private, and forcibly seize the means of production, and then eventually they move towards communism where everyone gives according to their abilities and receives according to their needs.

The end result of this oversimplification of Karl Marx sounds lovely, but never works. What tends to happen is that you end up with highly authoritarian states where everyone is poor, except for a select few at the top who do very well. Oddly, the socialist states often look very similar to the fascist states, even though they have different ways of getting there. This is one reason why past US policy of supporting any whack job fighting against the Communists has not gone well.

I don’t think the consistent failure of socialism is a coincidence. First of all, see my many previous posts about people being the problem. That one just never gets old. There’s more to it than that though. If your end goal is a society where everyone is unified and supportive of each other, the path to that does not start with the slaughter of other members of that society.

It’s not that you can’t make an argument that those greedy people are evil. We have plenty of evil capitalists around, and some of them may well deserve to be shot. However, once you decide that’s the answer, well, you are throwing away law and order, which has its own complications, and you have just become the tyrant.
And they rarely stop at the ruling elite. In Southeast Asia the royalty were targets, but so were people in the army that had served them, the Catholic priests and anyone who worked for them, and anyone deemed educated or intellectual, because we all know how dangerous thinkers are. I suspect there were other groups targeted too, but I’m just thinking of the refugees I knew, and why they had to leave. The point is, you are choosing hate and enmity instead of love and understanding, and for all the things that you can say against hippies, they are not likely to club you to death.

Now, does anyone really think that the President trying to make healthcare affordable is code for starting up a peasant rebellion against Koch Brothers and Kraft Foods?

Truly, socialism is now the code word for thinking that maybe the government should have some role in keeping life fair and bearable for those who do not fall inside of the 1%. (Yeah, the whole 1/99 thing is a total cliché now, but you immediately know what I mean and that’s what makes clichés work.)

Now here is the irony. This falsely labeled socialism, where there are safety nets and labor laws and regulations, is actually the best guard against the real socialism where the masses get miserable enough to start overthrowing their oppressors. The people who are coming the closest to promoting actual socialism are the Koch Brothers and Kraft Foods and Paul Ryan. How crazy is that!

(Koch Brothers is notoriously evil, but the reason I am picking on Kraft Foods is their participation in ALEC, which is a whole different rant, though certainly related.)

So here is my moderate request for some intellectual honesty. Okay, if you are going to choose evil, at least understand it and speak honestly about it. Don’t hold up signs requesting that the government stay out of your Medicare. And if you really do decide that your guiding philosophy is that you want the things you need, but you don’t want anyone else to have them, please quit trying to associate that with Christianity. That’s really not how it works.

You do what with the dead?

I did give up Hatchlings, and still struggling to find writing time. Unfortunately, the other big contenders, work and sleep, refuse to budge. I have had some good journal sessions, and letter writing, so it’s not that nothing is happening, but I still hope for more.

Here is that first hard topic I mentioned. It’s religious, and one thing that makes this more difficult is knowing the amount of context to provide—how much is necessary? Where my weakness is the tendency to provide too much exposition, and to not have enough time to finish, well, there’s a vicious cycle in there somewhere.
Anyway, there has been some news recently about Anne Frank being baptized posthumously by someone in the LDS church, and protests against that.

Here is where I try and give a brief background, as someone who is not in any way a spokesperson for the Church, official or otherwise. If you believe that baptism is necessary, as the Bible says, and that God is no respecter of persons, as the Bible also says, and you know that not everyone lives and dies on Earth even has a chance for that, it can seem very wrong, and it leads to weird theological explanations and disbelief.

What we know is that there is more than this life. People can continue to be taught and to make covenants after they have died, in the spirit, but someone physically needs to go through the ordinance of baptism for them. Christ preaching to the dead and baptisms for dead are both mentioned in the Bible (1st Peter 4:6 and 1st Corinthians 15:29).

Something that we do is research our family history and do this work for our ancestors, allowing them the opportunity to be baptized and binding the generations together. We believe that the promise in Malachi, chapter 4:5-6 is about this:
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smith the earth with a curse.”

One thing we definitely believe is that it is each person’s choice. If they don’t want to accept the baptism, it does not matter how many times we do it, it does not count. Something that also logically makes sense is that we believe this is true, and that it matters, but if we are wrong, then what we are doing is really meaningless. My point there is that no one is becoming Mormon against their will.

Obviously, we are supposed to be doing this for our family members, but other people have had projects in the past where they have focused on Civil War dead or so on, and what really created the controversy is when some people strongly objected to Holocaust victims being baptized. After all, they were killed for being Jews, and some felt it was demeaning to detract from that. I do not agree that it is demeaning, but I understand the sentiment, and besides we are supposed to be working on our family lines.

Since 1995 the Church has routinely published reminders on that (we just got another round), and at first I found it somewhat irritating that it was necessary. I felt that anyone who was going outside of the norm was doing it out of ego—like it was not special enough to find great-great-grandmother like everyone else; I’m going to save Marilyn Monroe! (Seriously, I remember one person who was very proud of having baptized Moliere.)

With this last story, I ended up feeling differently, and what made the difference was reading that the latest time happened in a temple in the Dominican Republic. I started to feel like maybe it was not someone who knew the boundaries and just did not want to stay within them, but maybe it was a newer member who found this and thought it was great, and had read The Diary of Anne Frank and felt a connection to her (how can you read it without feeling a connection?), and just wanted to offer that gift.

I’m not saying that the restrictions should be raised, but it reminded me that people aren’t always just being bone-headed. There can also be kindness, and affection, and a desire to do good. And really, there is nothing wrong with this particular desire—we’ve just agreed to hold off on it because some people get offended by it.

I do have more to say about this at some point, both about discovering my own family, and doing work for a friend, which is its own story, but for now my point is just, hey, my church is made up of people. Yours probably is too. Even if you have no religion, and are atheist or agnostic, you are probably affiliated with other humans. It is worthwhile to have some understanding for that, and to have some compassion for good intentions and a desire to serve.

The Change I Wish to See in the World

I have been meaning to blog a lot more than I have actually been blogging lately. This is kind of always true, but less true in some ways. I have definitely had periods of less blogging activity than now, and I also have two posts started on two different topics, but I can't seem to finish, and in general I am feeling stalled. I am still dealing with the usual lack of time, but there are two other issues.

One was simply a matter of timing. I wanted to write about the move away from intellectual honesty--actually, any kind of honesty--in contemporary politics, but the news of Andrew Breitbart's death broke that same day, and posting that would have felt like I was dancing on his grave. If Shirley Sherrod can be classy about it, so can I. (That's another problem with procrastination really. I could have covered that months ago.)

Another issue has been a feeling of pointlessness, amplified by a recent blog post by Paul Krugman:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/this-tribal-nation/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

In a nutshell, facts and logic do not penetrate ideology. This is especially true on the conservative side, but that's usually the one that I'm pecking at. Okay, my post on the occupy movement would be more anti-liberal (though it isn't, really), but generally a lot of what I want to write about is stuff that would not be believed by those who need to believe it, even if they were going to read it, which cannot realistically be expected. So why do I even bother ever writing about anything but shopping or weight loss or cute things my dogs do?

Well, because I can't give it up. I do care about music and television and movies and boys and cooking, but I also care about politics and education and psychology and environmental issues. And I'm glad I care. I should care. There's not just a great big world out there--there's an enormous universe! And it's interesting and important. There are no excuses for boredom or apathy.

I have still been debating about whether I should do anything differently, and I don’t really know, but here are a few thoughts that have been floating around.

1. I’ve seen this quote written different ways, but I will go with the one I like best, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Ghandi

I want people to be able to speak courteously and open their hearts and minds to good things. I am still ardently pro-thought. So, I should keep learning and thinking and pondering. Does that mean I need to write it though?

2. “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein

Possibly I do need to write it, just to know that I actually am making sense. Writing is still how I work out the buzzing thoughts crowding my head.

A friend was considering starting a new blog, but was wondering if people would read it, and I said it doesn’t necessarily matter. I get an average of six hits per post. That is not a lot (though I appreciate them all, and I love comments), but even if no one ever read it, I still get benefits from the mental process of organizing my thoughts and finding the proper words, and from opening myself up enough to put my words out there for the world.

3. Every now and then I get comments from people who agreed with me already (See?), but found my phrasing helpful. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that can eventually matter for point number one.

And again, I can’t give it up. I may never make a cent from screenwriting, but I can’t just stop it either. I must write.

So, the next two posts (I think), will be some really hard and controversial topics, and then they will be followed by other hard things, and then by some fairly trivial things, and then probably more deep stuff. But I need to quit procrastinating because then there is all this ground that I have partially written in my head, and I could have referred back to it if I had gotten it out of my head earlier.

I’m afraid that just from a time perspective I am going to have to give up Hatchlings.