Today was kind of a sick day for me. After going to the class for which I TA, I headed back home and started cleaning the living room. For my entertainment while doing so, I cracked open my 70th Anniversary Wizard of Oz Blu-ray. As soon as the movie started up, I was transported to my childhood in the early 90s. When I was a wee little thing, my parents had taped the 1989 50th Anniversary TV Special, which had a very neat documentary about the film narrated by Angela Lansbury. I remember the commercial at the beginning telling people to fill out their census. I remember the fast food commercials in between featuring fish sandwiches in clam shells (which I'm pretty sure were narrated by Eartha Kitt). I remember the Salad Shooter commercial. I remember watching it with my grandfather until the tape was nearly worn out.
It was that last memory - sitting beside or with my grandfather in his chair, watching and singing and laughing along with the movie - that was most with me when I was watching today. It was what I remembered at key moments in the film, and what made my eyes sting with tears that never actually came. The only other movie I watched with him more was the second VHS tape of Titanic. That one I would stick in the VHS player and my grandfather would always ask, "Are we sinking the boat again?" To which I would always reply, "It's the best part!"
I have run my self to the bone these last few weeks. I felt my limit coming on Wednesday night when I was staying up late trying to finish an assignment that was a few hours past due. When I woke up early then next day, I felt like I was physically hollow yet heavy. It's a familiar feeling, one that I've encountered many times in undergrad after pushing myself too far to be functional anymore. After my class (where I was basically told that I had been assigned the wrong book) and after disappointing news from work (work harder to get the same amount of pay), I felt it was time to let go for a day or so.
I went to bed somewhat late last night (I've almost become nocturnal, so it was hard not to), went to class this morning, came home, watched the Wizard of Oz, and felt like I was five again. I fell asleep during the movie, and ended up taking a nap directly afterward. It was glorious.
When I woke up again later today, I knew I had things that needed to be done, but I took my time working on them. I'm still not done, but with my sleeping schedule, it won't be a problem to finish them soon.
So a retreat to Oz and back and a convalescent period in my living room has gotten me from about 25% to 80% or so, which is pretty damn good for one day.
Happy Friday, everyone.
(If you want to help me out by giving me fodder for blog posts, don't be shy to use formspring.me/adamantfire. I won't answer/write on everything, but you never know what I'll use.)
Working hard on grad school work. I've written 26 pages in two days, and I'm only a little over halfway done. If only I won some sort of prize for hitting 40 pages in three days. Listening to Michael Jackson on repeat has simultaneously done wonders for my productivity and ensured that his songs are still playing on a loop in my head even if I don't have the music on.
I've been lamenting my absence from this blog, considering it's my only official persona online anymore (all of the others being defunct or abandoned). Since I know people who blog every day, and I have been reading the 120-year-old diaries of a man who wrote nearly every single day of his life for 51 years in the 19th century, I've felt a creeping inspiration.
So. I've decided to split the difference between blogging every day and my inevitable laziness and promise to post three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I can't promise that they'll be much good at that rate, considering how hectic my life is now, but they will never be a one word post. I'll give you something good, whether it's a story link, a video, a picture, or an actual honest-to-God blog post. There will be many times this semester when sparse posts will take every ounce of my being to post due to how much of my time is spent doing grad work (on the aforementioned diaries alone, I'm spending about 22 hours - that's reading and then doing a written exploration - on each diary year every week). But it's my promise, more to myself than to anyone who's reading this (you're more than welcome to come along, however).
To make good on my promise and make this more than just an update post, I thought I'd update you all on how #59 is going.
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I decided to try whittling and carving as a way to pass my time in the apartment (where I am 95-100% of the day) that wasn't video game related. From what I knew of the hobby, I really didn't need much, so a small investment would get me pretty far. Once I developed some skill, I could decide whether I wanted to get deeper into the hobby or go ahead and do my mastery project (I'll explain in a minute) and call it done.
I made several mistakes when I decided my approach to #59. The first was my underestimation of the hobby itself. Whittling and carving is pretty intense. Background noise while working is okay, but it requires concentration and time. Almost every project that I could do that appeals to my standards for carving takes days, weeks, or even months to complete.
My second mistake was honestly thinking whittling and carving were the same thing. They most certainly are not. Carving has a refined connotation that whittling does not have, due to the methods that are used to achieve the final product. Whittling is about controlling your knife but not worrying about the rough edges. Whittled pieces look blocky and have a lot of flat planes on them. That comes from mainly using one kind of straight-bladed knife throughout the entire project.
Carving, however, is a different beast. Carving is all about control, smoothness, continuity, seamlessness, and presentation. Carving tools are designed to make smooth cuts, or at the very least mask where you made subpar ones. In general (from my brief, mind-boggling look at the books I have), a whittled project is more likely to be painted, while a carved project is more likely to be stained. Whittling is more folksy; carving more professional. Whittling naturally has a whimsical and unrefined feel; carving is dramatic and stately. These are wide generalizations, but it's what I've been able to skim from the top of such deep and ancient skills.
Imagine my surprise when I started ordering whittling and carving supplies and resources only to find out from the books coming in that I didn't buy the right thing. So I splurged when I shouldn't have and experimented with tools themselves without the book telling me what to do. I found out very quickly why most pieces, whether they start out more as whittling or carving, end up using both. The good woodworker, a voice in the back of my brain told me, would be able to master both.
My third mistake came from my location. I live in an apartment, and noise travels quickly (I got six noise complaints right after I got the newest Coheed album). Woodworking, at its more advanced levels, refuses to be quiet: mallets start coming into play, as well as drills, sanders, saws, etc. Spacewise and soundwise, this hobby can quickly become incompatible with the fruits of "budget-living." I'm far from the mechanical bit, and I'm still a bit away from the mallets (if only because I can't afford one and the carving tools that come with it). It's the spatial part with which I'm having a fit. My roommate and I barely have enough time to clean or enough room to walk as it is. Building a workstation of the type suggested by virtually every magazine and book I have looked at is simply impossible (unless I put stuff out on the balcony in the cold weather).
My fourth mistake, and possibly the one that will cost me the most time, was overestimating my ability to work on my mastery project. My #59 Mastery, at least on the whittling side, was going to be a chess set. I don't know what it will be on the carving side, or what my whittling mastery project would be if I carved chess pieces, but I have this vague wonderful idea of a detailed chess set with oversized pieces that would become a family keepsake.
I'm currently working on a turtle. It was a template with a plaster model. When it came, it basically said, "Go at it and have fun." I've spent three hours on said turtle in total, and it's coming out of the wood. But I have absolutely no creative experience in the realms of drawing, painting, or sculpture. There is a learning curve that I did not foresee, whether because of my own overconfidence, my lack of knowledge, or both, and I have turned what I thought would be a year-long hobby into a multi-year multi-stage possible obsession, in which I apprentice myself vicariously to the men and women who write books on carving and post on woodcarving forums. This is all to say, my mastery project, the project that, when completed, will allow me to cross #59 off of the list, is a multi-year project from where I stand today. It's all very daunting to say the least.
Feeling discouraged, I decided to just go to town on a block and see what came out of it. I had no idea what I was doing or what it was going to be. I had an inkling that a boat would be kind of neat, so I began whittling it more and more into the basic shape. I realized that my tools were wrong for carving out the curved middle of the project, so I had to order even more tools. When I finally got them in and was able to really dig in, I was able to make in about two nights a little boat. Misshapen, yes. Crude as well. The inside bottom of the boat is grooved and rough, while the outside is sanded and a little pock-marked. The bow and stern are not symmetrical. I slashed my hand four times and stabbed my thumb and middle finger twice in the process. Ugly as the whole process was, I still fell in love with my boat.
The inside of the boat. The piece of wood on the left is about two inches longer than the single piece from which the boat was created.
The underside of the boat. All of the visible shavings are from hollowing out the inside.
We didn't have any bandaids Paper towels and packing tape was the next best thing. The bandaid situation has been taken care of with a package of awesome Transformers band aids.
My confidence having been restored, I have decided to soldier on. Once I finish that damn turtle, I might feel invincible. It's too late to turn back now, anyway.
Any of you get into a hobby that got over your head in about two seconds?
When I first started my list of 100 Things to Do Before I Die back in October of last year, my friends had two reactions: they asked if I had really made a “bucket list,” and they promptly told me which items they had completed. Several said that they would contemplate lists of their own, or that they admired my will to even attempt something so ambitious but they could never do so themselves (for the record, I disagree vehemently).
I really had no idea of what to expect when I made my list. I had only a few ideas when I began it, and I didn’t let myself get up until I had finished it. Several ideas turned into a hundred. When I finished it, I told myself I couldn’t change it, which immediately led to those moments of regret (“Why the hell would I make chain mail [#73] and a suit of armor [#74]?”) and worries about sheer possibility (finish a novel [#87], learn a second language [#63], and, er, #1). I felt some of the options I had were too stupid to be life goals (ten Halloweens with beard-wearing [#94]), or were too materialistic to really be worth accomplishing (seven mention “own” [#99, 92, 91, 81, 79] or “buy” [#67, 66], and those are only the ones that are explicitly about acquiring).
After I made the list, I would only remember bits and pieces of it. I’d have to return to the list to know what the hell I had written, and each time be surprised by what I found. Half of the list is in some fog of amnesia, and most of the other half is on hold until I have the means to complete it. A small part of the list, such as watching all of Mystery Science Theater 3000 [#89] and drinking 250 different beers [#85], are ones I am constantly working on and toward.
I was in the first semester of grad school when I completed the list. To put it bluntly, I was in an existential depression about the path I had chosen and my prospects along that path. Things had happened in my personal life that had threatened to upend the precarious balance my life had been put in by leaving home and to uproot what I had thought was my foundation. It was a scary time for me, being in a new place with adult responsibilities, and suddenly being saddled with problems that I could not possibly solve.
The time that I would have spent reflecting upon my list was taken away and has been on hold literally until now, nearly a year later. And yet, while the reflection upon on what my list could mean was on hold, the list itself began to have its effects on my life. Moments where I would have spent unproductively moping about my situation were suddenly filled with purpose. Instead of sleeping the semester away, I stayed up and watched movies. I wanted to go out with friends to the bar because I actually had a mission to drink. I went to more concerts than I have in my entire life in my first semester, simply because I had a purpose.
And while it’s really taken me until now to climb out of that funk, I partly owe it to my 100 Things in the first place for making it out in one piece. I never thought it would mean much to me. I think I had originally envisioned it as a more of a rainy day endeavor than something that gave me drive and purpose. But here I am, planning for beards on Halloween and making blueprints for suits of armor as if it were as serious as finishing grad school or finding a job.
Sometimes the things you do on a whim end up being the best things you ever did.
A fellow grad student that I follow on Twitter said that Roger Ebert retweets (that is, he basically shows tweets he likes to his own followers verbatim) writers, artists, poets, and the like whose writing is like "bad high school poetry." To which I replied the following:
It's like being able to listen in on someone's echo chamber, or looking over his shoulder and seeing what he sees in the mirror.
Essentially, retweets do two things. One, they carry news like a virus, spreading from one person to another until almost every person on Twitter has at least seen whatever tiny piece of information has caught fire. The other is what I've hinted above - it creates a perfect reflection of a person outside of herself. It is a portrait created through negative space. When Ebert retweets writing, he is showing what he is drawn to and what speaks to him. A rapt follower can hear echoes of Ebert in his retweets. Regardless of whether the echoes are of his heart, his sense of irony, or his own brand of wishful thinking, they are significant.
But there is a danger to the echo chamber, and it's not just a Twitter phenomenon. It's the same phenomenon that populates the local sections of newspapers, and it's the same phenomenon that has kept television news so gossipy and literally incredible. Retweeting becomes a metaphor: the information, or the "tweet," comes from pundits and editors. The retweeters are other pundits and editors. Just as Ebert, a writer and critic by trade, retweets fellow writers and critics, Fox News "retweets" The Drudge Report and Olbermann "retweets" the Huffington Post, and vice versa.
These echoes are dangerous because they have a tendency to become louder than their source. When two phones are put on speaker phone and made to face one another, and then someone utters a single sound, the phones will echo back and forth into each other, becoming so loud they are a single undulating scream. This scream, when translated into words, slanted viewpoints, agendas, misunderstandings (in other words, when it is translated into "human"), is misleading and corrosive.
I used to be just as much a victim of this as anyone else. I mainly stick to Twitter for my news now, but there was a time when I only read blogs. They would report on each other as if the thoughts of other men and women in their living rooms "interpreting" AP press releases was worth something more than the key presses it took to blurt it out. Because what I read mostly aligned with my political beliefs (and if it didn't, I tried to read with an open mind but I often read opposing viewpoints ironically), I stopped reading so critically. I became a bit hollow, and that hollowness was filled with other people's echoes. Yet their echoes were only echoes of others, and those others' echoes were echoes of yet others, and so on and so forth until all that was left was a single, undulating scream. If this is what I was reading, then with what kind of corrosion was I filling myself? I stopped reading political and news blogs more because they were taking up too much time than that I had some sort of epiphany regarding their effect on me. That doesn't mean, loyal Twitterer that I am, that I don't fall into the trap again every once in a while. But whenever I see a political blog or see pundits on TV, I try to remind myself that, almost always no matter who they are, the words they say come from a hollowness filled with echoes.
Some of you might not be acquainted with film critic Armond White, but it only takes a simple search at Rotten Tomatoes to get a snapshot of the kind of critic he is. He agrees with the Tomatometer (the aggregate rating for any film on Rotten Tomatoes based on positive and negative reviews from individual critics) only 52% of the time. Not that critics should submit to groupthink, but White's reviews are almost always deliberately contrarian. Famously, he lauded Transformers 2 for visuals and attacked Toy Story 3 for its commercialism. He praised Clash of the Titans (don't even get me started) by saying that it showed "a better sense of meaningful, economic narrative than the mess that Peter Jackson made of the interminable, incoherent Lord of the Rings trilogy."
For once, instead of being forced to look at White as an inaccessible contrarian who gets page views from his dissent, we can finally hear his reasons for his rather heretofore inexplicable role in professional criticism. Whether his reasons are good or not is not really the point. How he answered is the actual wonder. While he says that Roger Ebert, one of the most internationally famous, well-written, and prolific critics, "destroyed film criticism," and while, when asked what other critics he would suggest others read, he could offer no one but himself, it seems obvious that White answered with his ego rather than his heart. Regardless, the interview is worth reading, if only because it is of a professional who seems eternally disgusted with his profession.
After a plea for a makeover and a wave from MundaneJane, Monda over at NoTelling took pity on me and made my blog look amazing. I cannot thank her enough for working her magic.
I told myself that if my blog didn't look like it had been beaten with ugly sticks, stones, bricks, etc., that I would write more often. It looks like I have no excuse now, because the blog redesign looks absolutely stunning.
I am formally leaving VDCC as a headstone, a marker of a format that is dead but a passion that is not. Whatever cultural criticism I have, whenever I find my voice in the coil, it will go here. I still have my Tumblr account, but its future is unknown. I am not interesting enough to have multiple blogs and zero redundancy, so it's back to training wheels with one blog, at least for a while.
For those who can’t see my Facebook, this is how the current quote section looks.
Me: I went to France!
Matt: Fun! How’d it go?
Me: It was a lot of fun. The food is good, if expensive.
Matt: Trust the French to take it out of you for sustenance.
Me: Funnily enough, I didn’t have cake.
Matt: Hah! That’ll show the oft misquoted aristocracy!
Me: Indeed! *adjusts monocle*
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Building a desk in my room:
Me: And here’s the part where I’d need a hammer. Dammit.
Anthony: Do you have anything heavy?
Me: My head. I can just hit all of the nails in that way.
Anthony *completely serious*: Well, we can wrap it in a blanket.
Me: …What? Well, I don’t… what?
Anthony: What? Oh, I didn’t mean that. I meant whatever you used.
Me: I was hoping that wasn’t our only option.
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Walking past a Tyler Perry movie poster:
Me: On my list that I’m making of a hundred things to do before I die, one of them is to see a Madea movie.
Grad School Drew: Well, one, I hope you really are making a list, and two, I hope that that’s not on it. Because we shouldn’t be talking.
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“I want nap options.”
-Hannah
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“I still can’t believe that those are free.”
-Jeremy after a kiss from Lauren.
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“I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to open [the .wps file extension] these days. He might as well have sent us the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
-Jonathan
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“Don’t judge me for licking my hamburger.”
-Ash
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Lauren: I’ve enjoyed getting to know you while you’ve been here!
Me: And becoming best friends!
Lauren: Totally!
[At the same time]
Me: Best friends forever, best friends forever, ring!
Lauren: We’re the two best friends that anyone could have!
Me: [pause] We’re singing different songs, but they have the same sentiment!
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“I loved her too… But what man can compete with a god?”
-Maferath, DA:O
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Hannah: Magical Realism always makes me think crazy. ‘And then Hannah watered the garden with tears. Even now when the roses bloom everyone weeps. Hannah touched the doorknob and smelled lemons. And she knew that Pedro had died. So she made a quilt out of her own hair.’ I smelled lemons because everyone in the village said that Pedro’s heart was a lemon. He was mean and could never love anyone. I was the only person in the whole world who really knew him and loved him. When he died I was his only mourner. His daguerrotype fell down off the wall and broke into four equal pieces when he died. So I made a quilt that would be a part of my body and would never break and would never die. It would keep people I loved warm. And it was so big that when I folded it it was 5 feet tall! The end.
Jonathan: I rate your story 3 cuils. Highly recommended. Would read again. A++
Hannah: Thanks… It only happens when I pretend I am Spanish.
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There is always the rain, always the winter, always the shadows. The body vanishes, only the mind remains, watching and enduring; a little flame flickering in the shadows. So it will go on until dawn slowly casts its light through the rain onto these heroes, these pale faces and frozen bodies.
-L’Argonaute [French WWI trench newspaper], 6-15-1916
Dream opens and it’s Thanksgiving with the family. We are in what seems like the windowed basement of a HUGE cathedral. The basement itself looks something like a hobbit home. Something happens (I think we didn’t have a lot of food), and the meal’s basically over as soon as its begun, and we’re all still hungry. I hear something above us and go to see what it is. I go up stairs that take me to one of the towers in the church. I see four or five women just outside of the tower. I know I’m several stories up, so this should be impossible. Then I realize that they’re flying. I know they’re magical, so I asked them to help feed my family. One of them immediately scowls and curses me. I beg the other women to please bless us and help us eat. The lead one takes pity on me, and reverses the curse and points towards the stairs. I scramble back down the stairs to see that the table was now covered in delicious food. I tell my family to come see, and they can’t believe it. They ask me what happened, and I flat-out tell them, “It was a coven of witches.”
I think this is where that dream ended, but it cut away to the whole family being in church. The preacher tells us to start a hymn, but things get out of control really fast somehow. Apparently, everyone wanted to do a solo…? Which is just ke-ray-zay. So all of the sudden it becomes Interminable Singing Sunday, and people are singing for hours and hours. One of my grandmother’s piano students gets up to play the piano, and starts talking about how she can play the clarinet and the saxophone, and that she will play those next (I have no idea if she plays these instruments). Then my mom, who never goes to church and rarely plays the piano, gets up and goes to play the piano while my grandmother’s piano student looks bewildered and then tries to sing. I’m pacing up and down the aisle, ready to get out, pondering whether or not I’m a pagan since I’ve seen a pagan miracle, but no one seems to take any notice. Finally the preacher regains control and says that the service highlighted two of the reasons why she left – disrespect and disorganization. The service ends, and we go into the sanctuary. I hear some of the younger kids talking about how someone has sold their drugs, and that they should make a pretty good profit. I fly off the handle about how they shouldn’t be selling drugs. I asked them whom they were selling drugs to and they said, “Young kids and older people,” which made me even madder. I told them they were going to ruin kids’ lives and this wasn’t a win-win situation.
Then I went out in the parking lot and people I knew from high school were there. I started talking about a good friend from high school who had dropped out and I had lost contact with, and immediately people began telling me awful lies that he had told them about me, and how I was an awful person. I kept telling them that the things they were talking about never happened, but they wouldn’t listen. I was starting to cry and yell at them when I woke up.
