The stars

NateNAngela@Halloween 12

At my high school graduation, my teacher gave each student in my class a simple congratulatory card. On it showed a child gazing curiously into the moon, sitting in a sprinkling of stars. The message: "shoot for the moon. Even if you, miss you'll be amongst the stars."

Ignoring the obvious impracticality, or even awkwardness, those words were marginally inspiring and mildly impressive. Back then, of course. Yet sufficient for it to persist in me to this day.

Thank you SKK. Your mark, though subtle, is indelible.

Novels

We light curves

Musings on types of novel-creation. It would appear, from my limited readings, that the novels are inspired by two means: conclusion-inspired or theme-inspired. Of course, there will be exceptions to these which may very well be the majority. Nonetheless, such a simplistic categorization may elucidate or enrich reading.

Conclusion-inspired writing begins with a conclusion; thereafter the author enriches the process to the conclusion. Example:
Step 1: My family bought a dog. My dog died.
Step 2: My family bought a dog, a german shepherd. My dog, died four years ago.
Step 3: My family bought a dog, a humanly-sentient german shepherd. His wonderfully mysterious sensitivity to our lives started my family's passion of pets. My dog, died four years ago.
Step 4: My family bought a dog, a humanly-sentient german shepherd. His wonderfully mysterious sensitivity to our lives started my family's passion of pets. (Insert more details) My dog, died four years ago.
Step n: "Novel completed".

Theme-inspired writing may originate from an author's desire to create a fictitious world or describe an imagined variation of a current situation. The author might then weave incidental stories, which describe the world or phenomena created by the author. Example:
Step 1: In the future, mankind struggles for individuality and integration into complex social networks.
Step 2: In the future, mankind struggles for individuality and integration into complex social networks. Jane finds herself subject to such personal conflict daily. She leads a typical life: complete with an awkwardly-functional family, image-conscious cadre of friends, hypersensitive allergies to basic food types and an incurable addiction to expose her thoughts to the multi-web. The multi-web is a reinvention of the world wide web after the "year of criticality", as termed by workers in networking theory. The web, as we know it, inevitably embedded human interactions into its transmission protocol. A user of the multi-web is no longer a user, but a key component of its functionalities, in a statistically averaged sense. ...
Step n: (story continues to a satisfying ending about Jane's story, with an extremely detailed description of the world I intended)

My point:
I lament the rarity of books with strong evidence of both inspirations.

窗口

Fallen View

宁静的清晨四点半。破晓前已经从满身汗的睡眠中醒来。睁开眼；四周似熟似生，紧紧对照了目前生活的状态。感觉上似乎成为失去权力的长期旅客，时间停留在船乘离开与进港的失落。言语，笔记，手足，都无法表达目前的感受。渐渐习惯了为前途而恐慌。渐渐为目下的方便而部下无数谎言。累了吧，不想再解释了，也不见得有愿耳恭听。只有五点钟，电风扇的杂声陪伴我。

Bottling it up

Bottling it up

Every once in a few months I ask myself the question I currently fear most: what have I been doing with my life?

............

Moments later I realized my breathing had stopped in pace with my frozen thoughts. The stillness condenses into a blush which blooms a sweat along my spine.

Damn. This occurred more frequently after entering an ivory tower where material rewards nearly disappear, and silence grips me whenever I find myself. Then alternately exposed, too quickly, to the fancies of the "real world", always encrusted with a thick layer of showiness.

How do you crack an rock? Alternately heat and cool its exterior with ruthless haste. Do it enough and you will find shards or crumbs. Useless knowledge about geography still mocks me after all these years.

Again! "What were the past 27 years spent achieving?" This time, much louder, followed by a decidedly painful silence. Water starts dripping down my face.

I, like most of my peers, am a multi-millionaire: I've already been given beyond 14 million minutes to decide the answer to this question. Too many gone, too few remaining. Five million were spent sleeping. Nearly two million were consumed away. With my memory probably holding less than tens of thousands of minutes worth, I wonder about the squandered remainder.

I forcefully bottle up this minute's worth of panic, suddenly resolved to act; wishing away this dread, knowing its shadow will seek me again.

Reaching for the towel, I step out of the shower and begin my promised new day.

Technorati Tags: graduate school

Friends

Range - View from Sulphur Mountain, Banff.

Who do we consider our friends: people who care about us or whom we can get along? One condition does not strictly guarantee the other. We sometimes find ourselves having to tolerate our friends when one of these two conditions are starkly absent. But tolerate we do, if only to sustain a lazy habit, or subjugate to peer pressure.

I've seldom sought new friendships, even though I like meeting new people. Meeting new faces erases the tiring recurrence of bad habits and social bullying. Perhaps this is why I like traveling. It affords a temporary escape from my habits. But, I digress. This, after all, is a blog.

I've only come to realize the influence friends exert on my life. I start to behave more like them, or less like them, but never unchanged. I tend to either strongly agree, sometimes without reason, or strongly disagree, usually with unthinking haste. The latter situation is nearly always a precursor to the end of an the friendship.

It is a compulsory struggle which bears upon me. I am strangely disturbed by my inability to stay constant, or to hazard a cliche: "stay true to myself", whatever "true" and "myself" may mean to the world. If my "true self" is merely a composite of past prejudices, should I accept influence of friendships as a personality gained from my history?

If we do become our friends, or take on some of their dominant qualities, should we not surround ourselves with positive people whom we can get along? Which brings us back to my first question: what about our friends whom we care about but exhibit very negative personalities? After all, friendships are about "being there" and "support" and other terms which go well with Saturday morning cartoons. Maybe we should also grow such a positivism in ourselves, so that our more negative friends can benefit from.

Unless, of course, they are the sort who dislike optimism or constructive opinions. After all, who likes to be told what to do, in this new liberal age?

If these don't work, we can always go with what is most convenient. But to think that we spend so much of our time worrying about our career, our future and finances, should we not devote attention to picking our friends who decide the our personality?

Tough choices with no single solution for every situation.

The mountain range we have to adventure continues into the horizon, with the setting sun blinding our eyes temporarily from the discouragement of the majestic view.

Offline

Microphone

....
In the meantime, I've thought about what I want from myself during this lifetime; a lifetime with an unannounced end.

I think my current answer is more specific than my first. Perhaps I am driven by my peers and mentors to seek meaningful creativity with my hands. Standing in the light of their enlightened minds, I wonder how far mine could shine.

And thus I continue to challenge myself.

Histories and Hysteresis

Crying.

A tree in a city's winter,
stripped of its cover...
...the foliage obscures the intents,
wrong turns and scars.

In winter, the leaves wither to reveal the emotional supports. Only then can we appreciate the structure of our sense of emptiness, pretense and insecurities.

Old proclivities and bad memories: histories and hysteresis.
Everyone deserves a private audience with their comfortable flaws.

Confused branchings align to a moving sun. We adjust to our daily contradictions and oxymorons, spreading our attention thinly over ill-defined expectations.

Each new branch walks in air, yet thinning all the time. Its tip turns back to find a shrinking trunk accompanied by a growing uncertainty. The branch adds what it can to augment the trunk, while the trunk teaches the branch its limits.

Exposed and weak, we stand against uncaring traffic, looking at the next naked tree, wondering if our apprehensions meet.

Toughen your bark; wait for the certain spring. Then again, you may hide your branches in secret hope that you will weary of the game if the final winter does not take you.

Come Spring

Fruition in Spring

My branches may shiver and my roots rock in the dirt. My dark colors too, add age beyond my expectancy. I hide in my layers, waiting for the scent of green. It will, I am sure, come for me.

Wait for my leaves to dance in sunlight, drawing circles in the breeze. Stand under them to twinkle starlight in the midday sun.

Take these fruits I saved in winter; harvest me.
Come spring I will feed you nectar of bees's envy.

An echo

The institution of marriage is founded on the same human tendencies as dating. Except the former legislates a much larger inertia against separation.

Yet in our longing for a type of perfection in another person, we neglect to look inward. For how can 2 hollow logs burn beyond the brevity of an forgotten flame?

Thin lines of truth

Centered

Everybody lies, with or without intention.

It starts with harmless exaggeration, perhaps to entertain the audience. After all, we all have soft spots for fireworks. Embellish the story, enrich the experience.

Next, our incomplete memory begs creative reconstruction. None of the details need to be correct or even make perfect sense. It just needs to fool the listener.

The vicious cycle repeats with the audience, but in a somewhat the reversed order (or maybe none at all): reconstruct the story when it needs to be retold, often so that the story "feels" accurate, then quickly embellish as is appropriate. Perhaps this is why old recipes are constantly "re-invented". Or so that the word "re-invented" may be meaningful.

If only all stories needed to make a minimum amount of "sense", for error-checking. It could be as easy as making logic annotations to the story or honest self-doubting remarks. How about making statements falsifiable? Leaving little "mental exercises" for the listener to complete could start the reconstruction process earlier.

But what I seek is utopian. The world finds on interest in verfiability; it merely wants to dangle morsels of fact on the thin lines of truth, against the backdrop of lies colored to dazzle.