"Was this any different than going into a foreign country where one just did not have some of these modern conveniences?"
Sat. 11/30/13 3:55 pm
The Wrimoer had gotten a large stint of writing done on the previous day. She had only a bit more to complete the 50 K word goal. She had set the timer to ring in one half hour. She had no concern over whether she would find anything to say for these last few words. The amount required for the last portion seemed so miniscule compared to what she'd done the previous day. Writing for this last segment seemed just a formality. She assumed she would be relieved to be finished with the challenge.
She had still not agreed that it had been a worthwhile effort. She was quite sure this was a foolish venture. But she had come this far, so she wanted to at least finish it. There seemed to be so few other things that she finished she thought.
On this day she was also feeling queazy quite a bit. She tried drinking a dose of cider vinegar with honey and cinnamon and a bit of water to dilute it a bit. That seemed to help momentarily, but the feeling had returned. If she could get concentrated on the writing she would perhaps forget about feeling queazy.
One of the little tasks she wanted to take care of that day was to get the car turned around so the windshield would be facing the South, the sun. When it had rained so and then frozen up afterwards, the windshield had frosted up all over the inside. Some of that frost was melted when she went to see about the car. It seemed a good sign.
The car started up. There was no warning brake light on as there had been before. The mechanic had come with his helper over a month ago and had looked at the car but never reported back to her. Her student had found out from the garage what the verdict was about the car. It was supposedly not worth repairing and would not take a sticker. It had not been leaking brake fluid though as had been suspected as a possible cause of the brake light being on. This verdict was not direct from the mechanic, and the Wrimoer had wondered whether she could keep creaking around town, while risking being stopped for the long overdue sticker, until the very last day of that sticker. She did not take the car out.
On this day after starting up the car and seeing no brake light on, she tried to put the car in gear. It had had another problem in warmer weather where it would not go into gear, but one could also not push in the button on the shift lever. It could take from one to 10 minutes before suddenly everything was normally. Now the button on the shifter lever moved freely, but the shift lever itself would not move out of 'park'. She tried repeatedly. She waited five minutes and kept trying. Nothing allowed that shift lever to move out of park. There was no way to move that car, to turn it around. How could it even be put in neutral when it came time to haul the car off? She wondered if it was the parking brake that was on. That condition had never prevented its moving before. Should she have tried to move the steering wheel?
She had tried what she could. Now would begin the chase to try to contact the mechanic again. She had so wanted to get that car turned around before it got buried in snow, It was much harder to clean off with the windshield facing the North.
The cat had come in to her calling in the morning. He had been sleeping in a chair all day. Usually if she readied to go downstairs he wanted to come down and leave as well. He had not noticed that she was leaving. He did not seem to notice her return, and lay still asleep in the chair. She was glad to have him staying in. There was to be some kind of weathers for the next day. It always threw her in turmoil to have to let him out before such weather, as he was very sporadic in his reappearances. Perhaps this time she would be able to keep him in through the next day's weathers. It always felt so much more comforting to know that the cat was safe and warm in the house.
The cat itself had no concerns about weather. She suspected he could not feel much wet through his thick long fur coat. If it was rainy weather, then that meant it was also warm out. If it was windy and cold, he had only to hole up in the lee of the wind. His coat would insulate him there too. She knew all this rationally, but it was hard to let go of the idea that the cat was out in 'weather'. She had almost only fearful associations of being out in cold blowing weather. There were plenty of people who loved being out in the drama of weather and feeling the power of it. They found it exciting and invigorating. She found it mostly frightening.
4:26 pm alarm reset
She had also been afraid of fireworks, balloons that could pop, and capguns as a young child. The fireworks came on the 4th of July in the display put on by Macy's along the Hudson River. She grew up in a 7th floor apartment on Riverside Drive, facing the Hudson River. They had a first rate view of the display. They never went down to join the crowds in the park. She was always too frightened of it though. She could not remember when she finally was able to get over her fear and enjoy them.
Had she been afraid of thunderstorms too? She remembered that her parents had told her a thunderstorm was God and the Angels moving the furniture around in heaven. From that she had figured out that the rain must be the angels crying, though over what she could not remembered. This was a story that gave her comfort and lessoned her fear. She was not clear about when they had told her this story. Had she not been afraid before that? Or had she not been aware of thunderstorms yet?
Thje Wrimoer was hitting a wall of wanting to give up. She was again not feeling good. She wanted to go lie down. She was feeling a bit chilled. She hoped the feelings would pass.
She still had to take care of that turkey. It was put away in the fridge but it needed to be portioned out into smaller servings. This needed to be taken care of soon. Her mouth had been watering to nibble at this turkey ever since she had made it. She found it very delicious and kept complimenting herself on what a fantastic cook she was. Odd that she could feel that queaziness on the one hand and feel her mouth watering over the turkey on the other hand.
This last bit of writing was going to be a hard stretch to finish she thought.
On the previous day she had received a call from her mother's now elderly cousin in Germany. This cousin called the Wrimoer a few times a year. They spoke German together. Their conversations were never long. The cousin was in poor respiratory health. The cousin loved that they could speak German together. It also meant a lot to her to have family contact. The Wrimoer had told her initially when they were first getting to know each other by telephone, that she did not have that same concern about blood relations. The cousin explained that to her family, after the war families had been so torn apart, that to them it was now very important to know where family members were.
This had not however meant that all the relationships between the family members were open and good. The Wrimoer's aunt, who lived in Germany, had no contact with this cousin. It saddened the cousin that this was so. She and the Wrimoer's mother had been delighted when they had found each other again and reestablished their connection. They had enjoyed their shared European political discussions across the ocean. The cousin was unfortunately not able to read the Wrimoer's mother's blog. This was in English, and the digital translation versions just turned it into gobbledygook. The Wrimoer was sure the cousin would very much enjoy that blog. For now it was not to be. At least there were other people who got to enjoy the blog. Her mother's sister for instance.
Every year since they had connected, the cousin sent a package of marzipan kartoffel to the Wrimoer. They were supposed to be for Christmas, but they came so much sooner than that. This year the package came with two smaller packages of the marzipan potatoes. The Wrimoer had steadily dipped into the first package every day just a few. When it was finally done, she was able to hold off starting the second package. She wanted to save it for closer to Christmas. If one did not start a treat like this, one could delay...
4:56 pm alarm reset
dipping in much more easily. She wondered why that was. Once one started a treat, it was just too tempting to be able to hold off overindulging in it.
It seemed she had one half hour left to complete the writing in, assuming that the rate of writing was what she usually accomplished.
Had she reached any conclusions? Did she have something she could conclude her writing with? She could think of nothing except to get it over with.
What were some of the things she had thought she might write about? When she woke this morning, after having done that long concentration of writing the night before, she had felt as if the having worked so long was giving her energy, an added zest for her day ahead. She had fizzled out over breakfast though. There she had taken the avoidance and delay route. She had resisted what she was now interpreting as responsibility and obligation instead of something to be done for the desire, fun, and challenge of it, She spent too long browsing idley looking for things to read. That endless restless searching that one did so much of online. As much as she wanted to do it on the one hand, she knew just how disquieting that way of being was. It was restless, this constant scanning and searching of something that would please one instead of simply facing what was in front of one's self and allowing oneself to get involved with that.
Many many years ago, she had been so thrilled when she signed up for cable tv. She had such fun using the remote control browsing through all the choices there seemed to be of things to watch. It started to dawn on her that there were so many channels, but there was still not really that much good to watch on the tv. The method of channel surfing put one in such a restless mode of trying to catch every bit that was good of several programs. One switched one's attention back and forth in an ever increasing hunger for what seemed better than something else. Finally she hit one of her financial difficulties, and had to give up the cable tv. She found herself so relieved not to have to deal with that constant pressure to make those little decisions about her attention. She had never again signed up for cable tv. There were only a few things she really missed about it, but she adapted to that quickly.
Was this any different than going into a foreign country where one just did not have some of these modern conveniences?
The Wrimoer was sitting there almost dozing off as she wondered what else she could write about. This was an odd place to be, so close and to feel one had gotten so little out of it.
Her ear felt like it was getting congested again. The heater had just come on. She wanted to look up to what degree barometric air pressure affected one's ears. She wondered if her ears were acting just like little barometers. They had been so good the last two days.
She wondered how the crafters and vendors had done at their craft fair that day. The Wrimoer had not seen any press about it. She had seen press about the new location for the big craft fair that had been put on by the Chamber every Thanksgiving weekend. It was to be held at the same hall that had held a craft fair only two weeks before and had done so on an annual basis. The Wrimoer wondered, that since these were put on by two different organizations, the brand identity of the two fairs would become very confused in shoppers minds. They would not even know which one was which or when which one was being held. She had seen how easily the public perceived and confused such things. This could be too bad for both events. That there had been no press for the fair at the gym seemed a red flag to her.
Two other red flags were that the table rent was very low. That was nice for some fairs, but this one had the potential to do such good business on this date, that it seemed like leaving money on the table to charge that little for table fee.The other red flag was that they had been very inept in
5:26pm alarm
... how they had spelled or capitalized things in their descriptions. The Wrimoer had tried to contact them about this initially, but the message had not gotten through. In almost every instance of using the name of the state, 'Maine', they had not capitalized it. Many other words were capitalized though. It was a mish mash description and showed such ignorance, that the Wrimoer found herself hesitant to participate. At that point the other venue had not yet made itself known that it was back in business. It was not yet a competing factor.
Once their press release came out, it was a competing event. That was not necessarily a bad thing, unless no one knew the event in the gym was going on. The Wrimoer had been hopeful though that there was enough of a corps just from the student body this fair represented, that it should not be a problem. She would perhaps find out later just how well it went. She had seen already that some visitors were finding it a nice fair. The question was would there be business.
5:33 pm 2507 words
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Friday, November 29, 2013
"They were like Hansel and Gretel's trail through the woods."
Fri 11/29/13 7:39 pm
The Wrimoer had left off writing for a week. She had gotten very much under the weather around then and let everything stop. Now as she had expected that she could simply transcribe her actual longhand journal entries to use as excerpts to insert into the Nano writing. But even that seemed too complicated at the moment. There was lots of writing that had taken place in the journal over the month. But transcribing would still mean having to go through the journal to choose what could be transcribed or not. It was looking like she was going to let this one go, even though she had gotten this close to finishing the challenge. Last she looked she had around 8000 words left. She felt too drained to do it though. For the moment she would just try with one more half hour timer setting.
The timer was set. She was writing about the moment again, in which nothing much was happening.
Thanksgiving Day was over with. She had had nice plans to visit a family with whom she used to spend the holiday until a few years ago. She would prepare her two dishes that were very personally traditional to her. These were dishes that she had figured out the recipes to because she loved them a lot. They came from the family where she used to spend Thanksgivings with during her college and Philadelphia years. That family had been a home base from her old New Jersey home, until they moved to Long Island. After her own family moved from New Jersey to Michigan, she would travel back to the old home town to this family. Her best friend would travel home all the way from college in St. Louis.
That family then moved to Long Island, NY. Her best friend moved back to the NY area to continue college there. They would both converge at the new Long Island home, from Philly and NYC, for Thanksgivings. These wonderful dishes her friend's mother made, were mashed orangey sweet potatoes . and a whole cranberry orange sauce. The Wrimoer had until first tasting these dishes, not liked either sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce.
It was for a Christmas dinner back with her own family in Michigan that she wanted to try these special dishes. She was acting as caretaker for her siblings, while their mother was off on a long visit to Europe. She had decided she wanted to try to replicate the dishes. She had no idea how she figured out how to make the dishes besides her friend's mother having given a rough description of what was in the dishes. The Wrimoer tried what she could. Both dishes tasted as much like what she had remembered and expected. She was very pleased with herself for having figured this out. The dish had been a success as well. Had she yet written down the recipes?
For several years she continued to make the dishes for every Thanksgiving and Christmas if she was cooking. Always just working by memory and eyeball measurements. She always believed that cooking and painting were very similar.
At some point she decided she should write down some form of instructions for the dishes. Her measurements were descriptions of the eyeball measurements., not even the commonly held measuring instruments. The cooking always yielded good results.
Every year that she made the dishes, she had made a note account of the cooking process. What time the prep started, what time something went on the heat, what time was this aspect ready. how long had this cooked, etc. She had a stack of these cooking preparation cards/notes going back to 1998.
8:10 pm - alarm, but the device had been open and did not ring. Reset.
The Wrimoer had somewhat promised to bring her dishes for the large Thanksgiving gathering. But she had not started the work in the daylight hour. When she came in the kitchen to start her task, she had lost all enthusiasm for it. Earlier in the day she had been ready for it. She had let herself get sidetracked though and then just could not face it.
It could have been more than that though. The last few years she had grown used to being home alone on Thanksgiving. She had found the day so special and peaceful, unlike any other day. Only perhaps Christmas and Easter were like this where she lived. Once everyone had driven off to the various destinations of celebration, the atmosphere outside became so quiet and still. It had such a peace about it. She loved to feel that atmosphere. One could not feel it when one was in the middle of a hubbub. Two years ago, she had spent almost the whole day writing for the Nano project, though she had not expected to.
She suspected that she also just did not want to go to the celebration, much as she wanted to see everyone. The thought of having to get ready in the morning, and then to be there with all those people, much as she loved people, just felt like too much for her. She called her friends and cancelled the plans. Then of course she felt guilty for having done so.
On Thanksgiving, she continued to feel guilty but was happy that she had cancelled. By afternoon, she was ready to try the cooking. She knew she would have to start while things were still sunny out, or the dark of the hour would kill her motivation. That was so odd for her in Maine. In NYC there was never any problem for her to be doing things at night and way into the night. Maine however shut down at night. She never wanted to do anything at night in Maine.
Perhaps that was part of the problem here for her. After twenty years, she still could not get used to how limited and small everything felt in Maine. Once she had moved here, it was just too much trouble to go back to where she had come from. She could never figure out what could be a good compromise. In NYC the cost of living was so high. In Maine, one could have much more access to nature. That came at a hefty price. Just as she wished to go out to public spaces where there would be a diversity of people, there did not seem to be such places in Maine. Everyone seemed to gather with their own types of people.
There were the monthly art nights where a certain demographic came out on the town to mill through the galleries, and see, and be seen. These were the people who frequented the upscale restaurants. for the most part. What she could afford for just being out in public, one of the fast food places, was mostly only populated by another kind of demographic, but also limited in its way.
People travelled in their cars by themselves. One ran into a diversity of people when one went grocery shopping or to the big box store. She had been disappointed long ago with the shopping experience at the local Main Street shops.
She was nearing the end of what she had to write about. She knew she did not have near enough material written. There was one more day in which to finish the challenge. She would see what would happen the next day with her writing. She had intended for this day to try for at least one writing session with the timer but had managed two. It would at least leave that much less to do tomorrow if she was going to try then too. She would see.
She wanted to see what more she could pull down from her social network comments. There had to be a fair amount of writing there by now. She still found this to to a foolish exercise for her
8:41 pm alarm reset
to have spent her time on. There she had reset the alarm. Her typing was too often coming out garbled now. She wanted to stop.
This day the Wrimoer had also cancelled her plans to participate in a local craft fair where she would have sold some of her artwork. This cancellation was on the same order as cancelling going out to Thanksgiving.
The craft fair would have meant getting up much earlier than she was used to in her daily routine, which was not such a good routine. She did not have on hand the inventory she felt she needed to have on hand. For a while that day she had thought perhaps she would be ok just taking orders at the craft fair. But then even that just did not make enough sense for her. It was all too sporadic, a one off thing rather than something happening on a fairly regular basis that could develop some kind of rhythm to it. No, there was more to it then that. All of these things, the cooking for dinners and transporting the food, the preparing products and transporting to a craft fair at which one might or might not sell the products - they all required so much preparation and lugging around - for too little payoff. Whether that payoff was how meaningful the interpersonal interactions were or how much business one did.. She felt there had to be better ways.
Recently a card order had come from her website. It had been strange for her. The order had been prepaid. The Wrimoer had a few products on her website that a visitor could pay for in advance, but as far as she could remember, these were products one could simply download as a digital product. Where was it that someone could pay for a specific product from her site? She had hoped she was making the expected product for the order. The materials had been on hand to make that product. Since she now had no car at her disposal, and also no printer, there was no easy means for her to make the product if she did not have on hand what she needed. She had managed to get it to the post office right away. The person had not figured in any shipping charge. The Wrimoer just let that one go. It had been quite a bit of work for a small product to make it, package, and walk to the post office with it in the very cold weather. But the small amount of money had gone into her digitaly payment account. She now had that much more in it than she had before.
Several weeks before that, at the end of the summer, she had gotten a request about notecards of a particular image. In this case the Wrimoer had already long ago made that image into a digital product that customers could pay for and print at home with their own equipment. She had made this in hopes that she could steadily build up a line of such products and not have to do the production work. In this case the customer had liked the image but wanted to buy the actual card. The Wrimoer directed her to the digital product. No, the customer did not find the product looked as good as what she was seeing on her screen. The Wrimoer had told her it would be awhile before she had gathered a collection of four images that went together well enough. And then the Wrimoer had forgotten about the question.
A month or more later the customer asked if she had found a solution yet and said she only needed one card. The Wrimoer was torn between the wish to accommodate the customer and the practicality or feasibility of dealing with such a small one shot request. One card was still just a $3.00 item. She had had a chance to look around and see a little bit what other people were doing for single cards. She was not crazy about the options. It still seemed like too much work/time/effort to be spending on such a little item unless one was moving several at a time. Even then, the Wrimoer would not have time to deal with such things if there were several such orders coming in. It all just did not make business sense or common sense. Perhaps to have someone else handling it, or if it could be automated. But she explored some ideas.
She found a place she could order a printed card and have it shipped.
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She was not sure if the terms of this business allowed such a thing though. She would have to reread the terms. This was from a huge company. They offered such a product for far less than all the others did, even undercutting the price their own actual supplier produced the product for. She had ordered a card for herself to see how it turned out. She made this option available to the customer. Told her that she would place order for her and the price would be $5.95 but she was not to pay for it until she received it and knew she liked it. It took a few days to arrive. The card looked nice. It also came with a packing sheet that listed what her cost had been. It was much lower that what the Wrimoer was charging. The Wrimoer wondered what the customer would be seeing for a packing slip. But this was no secret that a profit needed to be made. The customer had not let the Wrimoer know that the card had gotten to her, and neither had the Wrimoer asked. It almost seemed too silly to bother over what had only cost her $2.00 to produce.
Finally on this day, the Wrimoer decided she had better invoice for the cards. She did so. She offered that the card could be paid for by check, or by digital payment. This had all taken time to write up, to ponder just how to act on the issue. The customer wanted to make an online payment. The Wrimoer wrote an invoice through the online payment system. And then in minutes, she received notification that the transaction had been paid. Her digital payment system reflected the payment and now there was just a bit more money in the account.
That had been a gleeful moment for the Wrimoer. She knew it was a game, a silly game. The actual value of what had just transpired was so out of balance. But she was letting herself be seduced by thinking that it could work in a way that was good for both parties. Did she have time to sit around making such little things on a continual basis for people? It was one thing to make something that would be of use to people over and over again, that would get such use. But these little dribs and drabs of small exchanges? It was a seductive game. She had to watch out for it eating into that rare commodity of the time one had for things.
Why did one think one had to spend November writing a novel, or something like it? Once one had learned one could do something to that effect, what was the point of doing it again? On knew one could do it. Did one really produce anything of value in that time frame? If you knew you could do it, it did not need to happen in November. It did not need to take only one month. If one were serious about writing a novel, one would take the time one needed to. One did not have to wait for that month in which to do it. One did not need to be doing it along with others. If one wanted to write a novel, one went ahead and did it.
Perhaps one could call the fruits of November writing with those constraints, simply November novels. And were they just November Novels because of their prefixes. Was that even why they were to be written in November?
She hoped she had enough written at this sitting that if she truly did want or expect to finish this it would be somewhat doable.
How odd to have such a feeling of 'Bingo' over that little sale, that had it occurred at one of her craft fairs, would mean nothing. It was perhaps the potential that seemed to be lurking - there could be lots of little sales like this... She had to keep reminding herself - they were useless if they were not automated or handled by someone else. If she looked at it rationally, she had to see that it was not sustainable, it was not a viable business model. But so seductive. She had gotten so off track again.
9:41 pm alarm, reset
The previous day the Wrimoer had gone through a dark spell, where she just could not see a way out of things. What did she want to do with herself? Of feeling so stuck with what she felt was available to her. Then she'd remembered something she thought she still wanted to do, and that she felt needed doing. She still wanted to write/produce some kind of children's book that had a local appeal. Something dealing with at least one animal and a local spot. There was a need for such books for all the visitors that came to the places around here. She had seen what was out there. There was not that much with good pictures. There were a few nice books with dogs, and only one book with decent cat illustrations in it. This in a time when people loved cats. Most of the Maine books with dogs were very poorly done. It did not matter. People wanted books about the places they visited. The Wrimoer had a rough idea of at least one storybook she wanted to do. This was something she needed to sink her teeth into.
What she had liked so much about doing Nanowrimo, was a) it needed to be done almost every day. Even that did not need to be. But in doing the work one could watch one's efforts pile up, add up. Aha! That was what the 'bingo' had been about the little payments coming in to the online payment system. They started to add up. It was not the actual money, but that it was the watching something grow aspect of it. To translate a work effort so that it would have those same enjoyable effects of getting seeing one's efforts grow. How did one do that with in another medium - how did one track it so that it was a bit like a game and gave one that little boost?
That was what got her started with doing the paintings of local Maine scenes, It was the stack of paintings that started growing, and taking on the appearance of a book in the making. That had made her keep on with it.
Aach - she had just had and lost a glimmer of an insight. Hopefully it would return shortly. Now what could she think of while she also hoped it would return. One never knew how these things came and went..
There - it was like knitting. She thought she had said these things elsewhere before. But, this she believed was why people so enjoyed knitting. It was a thrill to watch something appear, to grow, out of the ends of one's hands. At first one just had those few rows of knitting and one had so much to knit before it could have any substance to it. But there came the day when there started to appear something. It was a magic, a slow magic. It came from a seed within - one should remember that. Just the impulse, the desire, to make it was what started it. From there one had to keep at it for a little while to get it to the point where it had any kind of presence. At last one could put it all together.
The Wrimoer used to knit. She did not remember where, when, why, or how she had stopped knitting. She thought it was probably when she had had a wonderful heather blue yarn for an aran fisherman knit sweater she was making for herself. She and her mother had found the yarn in Maine one summer. It had that lanolin smell to it. But someone, probably her mother, had miscalculated how much would be needed. Her mother had bought a yarn that went with the other, but not in a workable way. Not in a way for a knitter who was not
10:11pm alarm, reset?
so experienced as to be able to figure out how to make this work. The yarn was a much lighter color and weight. The problem was just too big for her to solve. The poor sweater moved from apartment to apartment with her, She had gotten quite a bit done before having realized the degree of the problem. The sweater got hidden away in the depths of a storage section in the Wrimoer's captain's bed. Sometimes she would take it out and think she could solve the problem. This was just over her head though. She had not knitted again. She did not remember what had happened to the yarn or the knitting. She had probably thrown it away during one of her moves. Perhaps before coming to Maine. She did not know.
One could not do all things though. The night before there had been an interview with the singer Linda Ronstadt. She either had written a book or recorded an album. It had to have been a book she had written. The singer had Parkinson's and was unable to sing anymore. She could not control her voice the way she needed to. One of the other things she said she had to give up was knitting. She had loved to knit. Ronstadt was very philosophical about the whole matter. She sounded prepared to see whatever was in store for her. She had enjoyed all the experiences she had had in her musical career. Now it was a matter of what took place in the day to day of this kind of existence. It was another aspect of life to be lived. She had sounded very much at peace with how things were, and how the would be.
As the Wrimoer wrote, with every half hour's timer ringing, the ringer had startled her. She had reset the timer each time with the stipulation that she did not need to go as far as the timer. She could stop when she wanted. Why did she set it in that case? She thought it helped her continue somehow. She had not al all expected to go this long writing. But she had found things she wanted to tell, though they may have been boring, inconclusive, and uninspired. At least she had told bits of her stories for the recent days. She had rambled quite a bit she believed. Had she even finished any one story or idea? She might find that out whenever she returned to reread.
Writing longhand in the journal was different because she simply wrote the way she wanted to. She stopped to think and remember, to follow up on what she still wanted to tell, though she was probably only telling it to herself. It had become such a habit, no, a need to do it. There would be times that she would start out saying she did not want to get into detail about something just yet. Then she would just write a few words that she meant to serve as reminders or notes to herself. And then she could not help it, she found herself writing it all anyway. She usually spent hours a day writing by hand that way.
She wanted to try recording herself reading the longhand writing just to see how that would come out. It would require too much searching for what was interesting. She still found her journals useful. They told her where she had been. She liked that about them. They were like Hansel and Gretel's trail thru the woods - in pebbles, though, not with breadcrumbs which the birds ate up.
Now she really was needing to stop, but the timer was too close to going off. She did not think she would be surprised by it this time. Now she was aching for it to ring, as she thought she really did not want to write anymore. She had not even touched the tea that she had at her side. It was a fancy black tea one of her students had brought her. An Oolong. It must have been cold for hours now. Even as she wrote waiting for that alarm to go off, she could not bring herself to touch the tea yet. There were just those last few minutes to be typing away with the monkeys, producing words of almost nonsense.
So, that had been the second time she had thought she could try transcribing from her journals.
10:41 pm alarm at last! - that was it. She had written for 3 hours. Now she could check the word count. She guessed that she had done 4140 words? She would soon find out.
4255 words! 23.6 wpm
Fri 11/29/13 7:39 pm
The Wrimoer had left off writing for a week. She had gotten very much under the weather around then and let everything stop. Now as she had expected that she could simply transcribe her actual longhand journal entries to use as excerpts to insert into the Nano writing. But even that seemed too complicated at the moment. There was lots of writing that had taken place in the journal over the month. But transcribing would still mean having to go through the journal to choose what could be transcribed or not. It was looking like she was going to let this one go, even though she had gotten this close to finishing the challenge. Last she looked she had around 8000 words left. She felt too drained to do it though. For the moment she would just try with one more half hour timer setting.
The timer was set. She was writing about the moment again, in which nothing much was happening.
Thanksgiving Day was over with. She had had nice plans to visit a family with whom she used to spend the holiday until a few years ago. She would prepare her two dishes that were very personally traditional to her. These were dishes that she had figured out the recipes to because she loved them a lot. They came from the family where she used to spend Thanksgivings with during her college and Philadelphia years. That family had been a home base from her old New Jersey home, until they moved to Long Island. After her own family moved from New Jersey to Michigan, she would travel back to the old home town to this family. Her best friend would travel home all the way from college in St. Louis.
That family then moved to Long Island, NY. Her best friend moved back to the NY area to continue college there. They would both converge at the new Long Island home, from Philly and NYC, for Thanksgivings. These wonderful dishes her friend's mother made, were mashed orangey sweet potatoes . and a whole cranberry orange sauce. The Wrimoer had until first tasting these dishes, not liked either sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce.
It was for a Christmas dinner back with her own family in Michigan that she wanted to try these special dishes. She was acting as caretaker for her siblings, while their mother was off on a long visit to Europe. She had decided she wanted to try to replicate the dishes. She had no idea how she figured out how to make the dishes besides her friend's mother having given a rough description of what was in the dishes. The Wrimoer tried what she could. Both dishes tasted as much like what she had remembered and expected. She was very pleased with herself for having figured this out. The dish had been a success as well. Had she yet written down the recipes?
For several years she continued to make the dishes for every Thanksgiving and Christmas if she was cooking. Always just working by memory and eyeball measurements. She always believed that cooking and painting were very similar.
At some point she decided she should write down some form of instructions for the dishes. Her measurements were descriptions of the eyeball measurements., not even the commonly held measuring instruments. The cooking always yielded good results.
Every year that she made the dishes, she had made a note account of the cooking process. What time the prep started, what time something went on the heat, what time was this aspect ready. how long had this cooked, etc. She had a stack of these cooking preparation cards/notes going back to 1998.
8:10 pm - alarm, but the device had been open and did not ring. Reset.
The Wrimoer had somewhat promised to bring her dishes for the large Thanksgiving gathering. But she had not started the work in the daylight hour. When she came in the kitchen to start her task, she had lost all enthusiasm for it. Earlier in the day she had been ready for it. She had let herself get sidetracked though and then just could not face it.
It could have been more than that though. The last few years she had grown used to being home alone on Thanksgiving. She had found the day so special and peaceful, unlike any other day. Only perhaps Christmas and Easter were like this where she lived. Once everyone had driven off to the various destinations of celebration, the atmosphere outside became so quiet and still. It had such a peace about it. She loved to feel that atmosphere. One could not feel it when one was in the middle of a hubbub. Two years ago, she had spent almost the whole day writing for the Nano project, though she had not expected to.
She suspected that she also just did not want to go to the celebration, much as she wanted to see everyone. The thought of having to get ready in the morning, and then to be there with all those people, much as she loved people, just felt like too much for her. She called her friends and cancelled the plans. Then of course she felt guilty for having done so.
On Thanksgiving, she continued to feel guilty but was happy that she had cancelled. By afternoon, she was ready to try the cooking. She knew she would have to start while things were still sunny out, or the dark of the hour would kill her motivation. That was so odd for her in Maine. In NYC there was never any problem for her to be doing things at night and way into the night. Maine however shut down at night. She never wanted to do anything at night in Maine.
Perhaps that was part of the problem here for her. After twenty years, she still could not get used to how limited and small everything felt in Maine. Once she had moved here, it was just too much trouble to go back to where she had come from. She could never figure out what could be a good compromise. In NYC the cost of living was so high. In Maine, one could have much more access to nature. That came at a hefty price. Just as she wished to go out to public spaces where there would be a diversity of people, there did not seem to be such places in Maine. Everyone seemed to gather with their own types of people.
There were the monthly art nights where a certain demographic came out on the town to mill through the galleries, and see, and be seen. These were the people who frequented the upscale restaurants. for the most part. What she could afford for just being out in public, one of the fast food places, was mostly only populated by another kind of demographic, but also limited in its way.
People travelled in their cars by themselves. One ran into a diversity of people when one went grocery shopping or to the big box store. She had been disappointed long ago with the shopping experience at the local Main Street shops.
She was nearing the end of what she had to write about. She knew she did not have near enough material written. There was one more day in which to finish the challenge. She would see what would happen the next day with her writing. She had intended for this day to try for at least one writing session with the timer but had managed two. It would at least leave that much less to do tomorrow if she was going to try then too. She would see.
She wanted to see what more she could pull down from her social network comments. There had to be a fair amount of writing there by now. She still found this to to a foolish exercise for her
8:41 pm alarm reset
to have spent her time on. There she had reset the alarm. Her typing was too often coming out garbled now. She wanted to stop.
This day the Wrimoer had also cancelled her plans to participate in a local craft fair where she would have sold some of her artwork. This cancellation was on the same order as cancelling going out to Thanksgiving.
The craft fair would have meant getting up much earlier than she was used to in her daily routine, which was not such a good routine. She did not have on hand the inventory she felt she needed to have on hand. For a while that day she had thought perhaps she would be ok just taking orders at the craft fair. But then even that just did not make enough sense for her. It was all too sporadic, a one off thing rather than something happening on a fairly regular basis that could develop some kind of rhythm to it. No, there was more to it then that. All of these things, the cooking for dinners and transporting the food, the preparing products and transporting to a craft fair at which one might or might not sell the products - they all required so much preparation and lugging around - for too little payoff. Whether that payoff was how meaningful the interpersonal interactions were or how much business one did.. She felt there had to be better ways.
Recently a card order had come from her website. It had been strange for her. The order had been prepaid. The Wrimoer had a few products on her website that a visitor could pay for in advance, but as far as she could remember, these were products one could simply download as a digital product. Where was it that someone could pay for a specific product from her site? She had hoped she was making the expected product for the order. The materials had been on hand to make that product. Since she now had no car at her disposal, and also no printer, there was no easy means for her to make the product if she did not have on hand what she needed. She had managed to get it to the post office right away. The person had not figured in any shipping charge. The Wrimoer just let that one go. It had been quite a bit of work for a small product to make it, package, and walk to the post office with it in the very cold weather. But the small amount of money had gone into her digitaly payment account. She now had that much more in it than she had before.
Several weeks before that, at the end of the summer, she had gotten a request about notecards of a particular image. In this case the Wrimoer had already long ago made that image into a digital product that customers could pay for and print at home with their own equipment. She had made this in hopes that she could steadily build up a line of such products and not have to do the production work. In this case the customer had liked the image but wanted to buy the actual card. The Wrimoer directed her to the digital product. No, the customer did not find the product looked as good as what she was seeing on her screen. The Wrimoer had told her it would be awhile before she had gathered a collection of four images that went together well enough. And then the Wrimoer had forgotten about the question.
A month or more later the customer asked if she had found a solution yet and said she only needed one card. The Wrimoer was torn between the wish to accommodate the customer and the practicality or feasibility of dealing with such a small one shot request. One card was still just a $3.00 item. She had had a chance to look around and see a little bit what other people were doing for single cards. She was not crazy about the options. It still seemed like too much work/time/effort to be spending on such a little item unless one was moving several at a time. Even then, the Wrimoer would not have time to deal with such things if there were several such orders coming in. It all just did not make business sense or common sense. Perhaps to have someone else handling it, or if it could be automated. But she explored some ideas.
She found a place she could order a printed card and have it shipped.
9:11p reset
She was not sure if the terms of this business allowed such a thing though. She would have to reread the terms. This was from a huge company. They offered such a product for far less than all the others did, even undercutting the price their own actual supplier produced the product for. She had ordered a card for herself to see how it turned out. She made this option available to the customer. Told her that she would place order for her and the price would be $5.95 but she was not to pay for it until she received it and knew she liked it. It took a few days to arrive. The card looked nice. It also came with a packing sheet that listed what her cost had been. It was much lower that what the Wrimoer was charging. The Wrimoer wondered what the customer would be seeing for a packing slip. But this was no secret that a profit needed to be made. The customer had not let the Wrimoer know that the card had gotten to her, and neither had the Wrimoer asked. It almost seemed too silly to bother over what had only cost her $2.00 to produce.
Finally on this day, the Wrimoer decided she had better invoice for the cards. She did so. She offered that the card could be paid for by check, or by digital payment. This had all taken time to write up, to ponder just how to act on the issue. The customer wanted to make an online payment. The Wrimoer wrote an invoice through the online payment system. And then in minutes, she received notification that the transaction had been paid. Her digital payment system reflected the payment and now there was just a bit more money in the account.
That had been a gleeful moment for the Wrimoer. She knew it was a game, a silly game. The actual value of what had just transpired was so out of balance. But she was letting herself be seduced by thinking that it could work in a way that was good for both parties. Did she have time to sit around making such little things on a continual basis for people? It was one thing to make something that would be of use to people over and over again, that would get such use. But these little dribs and drabs of small exchanges? It was a seductive game. She had to watch out for it eating into that rare commodity of the time one had for things.
Why did one think one had to spend November writing a novel, or something like it? Once one had learned one could do something to that effect, what was the point of doing it again? On knew one could do it. Did one really produce anything of value in that time frame? If you knew you could do it, it did not need to happen in November. It did not need to take only one month. If one were serious about writing a novel, one would take the time one needed to. One did not have to wait for that month in which to do it. One did not need to be doing it along with others. If one wanted to write a novel, one went ahead and did it.
Perhaps one could call the fruits of November writing with those constraints, simply November novels. And were they just November Novels because of their prefixes. Was that even why they were to be written in November?
She hoped she had enough written at this sitting that if she truly did want or expect to finish this it would be somewhat doable.
How odd to have such a feeling of 'Bingo' over that little sale, that had it occurred at one of her craft fairs, would mean nothing. It was perhaps the potential that seemed to be lurking - there could be lots of little sales like this... She had to keep reminding herself - they were useless if they were not automated or handled by someone else. If she looked at it rationally, she had to see that it was not sustainable, it was not a viable business model. But so seductive. She had gotten so off track again.
9:41 pm alarm, reset
The previous day the Wrimoer had gone through a dark spell, where she just could not see a way out of things. What did she want to do with herself? Of feeling so stuck with what she felt was available to her. Then she'd remembered something she thought she still wanted to do, and that she felt needed doing. She still wanted to write/produce some kind of children's book that had a local appeal. Something dealing with at least one animal and a local spot. There was a need for such books for all the visitors that came to the places around here. She had seen what was out there. There was not that much with good pictures. There were a few nice books with dogs, and only one book with decent cat illustrations in it. This in a time when people loved cats. Most of the Maine books with dogs were very poorly done. It did not matter. People wanted books about the places they visited. The Wrimoer had a rough idea of at least one storybook she wanted to do. This was something she needed to sink her teeth into.
What she had liked so much about doing Nanowrimo, was a) it needed to be done almost every day. Even that did not need to be. But in doing the work one could watch one's efforts pile up, add up. Aha! That was what the 'bingo' had been about the little payments coming in to the online payment system. They started to add up. It was not the actual money, but that it was the watching something grow aspect of it. To translate a work effort so that it would have those same enjoyable effects of getting seeing one's efforts grow. How did one do that with in another medium - how did one track it so that it was a bit like a game and gave one that little boost?
That was what got her started with doing the paintings of local Maine scenes, It was the stack of paintings that started growing, and taking on the appearance of a book in the making. That had made her keep on with it.
Aach - she had just had and lost a glimmer of an insight. Hopefully it would return shortly. Now what could she think of while she also hoped it would return. One never knew how these things came and went..
There - it was like knitting. She thought she had said these things elsewhere before. But, this she believed was why people so enjoyed knitting. It was a thrill to watch something appear, to grow, out of the ends of one's hands. At first one just had those few rows of knitting and one had so much to knit before it could have any substance to it. But there came the day when there started to appear something. It was a magic, a slow magic. It came from a seed within - one should remember that. Just the impulse, the desire, to make it was what started it. From there one had to keep at it for a little while to get it to the point where it had any kind of presence. At last one could put it all together.
The Wrimoer used to knit. She did not remember where, when, why, or how she had stopped knitting. She thought it was probably when she had had a wonderful heather blue yarn for an aran fisherman knit sweater she was making for herself. She and her mother had found the yarn in Maine one summer. It had that lanolin smell to it. But someone, probably her mother, had miscalculated how much would be needed. Her mother had bought a yarn that went with the other, but not in a workable way. Not in a way for a knitter who was not
10:11pm alarm, reset?
so experienced as to be able to figure out how to make this work. The yarn was a much lighter color and weight. The problem was just too big for her to solve. The poor sweater moved from apartment to apartment with her, She had gotten quite a bit done before having realized the degree of the problem. The sweater got hidden away in the depths of a storage section in the Wrimoer's captain's bed. Sometimes she would take it out and think she could solve the problem. This was just over her head though. She had not knitted again. She did not remember what had happened to the yarn or the knitting. She had probably thrown it away during one of her moves. Perhaps before coming to Maine. She did not know.
One could not do all things though. The night before there had been an interview with the singer Linda Ronstadt. She either had written a book or recorded an album. It had to have been a book she had written. The singer had Parkinson's and was unable to sing anymore. She could not control her voice the way she needed to. One of the other things she said she had to give up was knitting. She had loved to knit. Ronstadt was very philosophical about the whole matter. She sounded prepared to see whatever was in store for her. She had enjoyed all the experiences she had had in her musical career. Now it was a matter of what took place in the day to day of this kind of existence. It was another aspect of life to be lived. She had sounded very much at peace with how things were, and how the would be.
As the Wrimoer wrote, with every half hour's timer ringing, the ringer had startled her. She had reset the timer each time with the stipulation that she did not need to go as far as the timer. She could stop when she wanted. Why did she set it in that case? She thought it helped her continue somehow. She had not al all expected to go this long writing. But she had found things she wanted to tell, though they may have been boring, inconclusive, and uninspired. At least she had told bits of her stories for the recent days. She had rambled quite a bit she believed. Had she even finished any one story or idea? She might find that out whenever she returned to reread.
Writing longhand in the journal was different because she simply wrote the way she wanted to. She stopped to think and remember, to follow up on what she still wanted to tell, though she was probably only telling it to herself. It had become such a habit, no, a need to do it. There would be times that she would start out saying she did not want to get into detail about something just yet. Then she would just write a few words that she meant to serve as reminders or notes to herself. And then she could not help it, she found herself writing it all anyway. She usually spent hours a day writing by hand that way.
She wanted to try recording herself reading the longhand writing just to see how that would come out. It would require too much searching for what was interesting. She still found her journals useful. They told her where she had been. She liked that about them. They were like Hansel and Gretel's trail thru the woods - in pebbles, though, not with breadcrumbs which the birds ate up.
Now she really was needing to stop, but the timer was too close to going off. She did not think she would be surprised by it this time. Now she was aching for it to ring, as she thought she really did not want to write anymore. She had not even touched the tea that she had at her side. It was a fancy black tea one of her students had brought her. An Oolong. It must have been cold for hours now. Even as she wrote waiting for that alarm to go off, she could not bring herself to touch the tea yet. There were just those last few minutes to be typing away with the monkeys, producing words of almost nonsense.
So, that had been the second time she had thought she could try transcribing from her journals.
10:41 pm alarm at last! - that was it. She had written for 3 hours. Now she could check the word count. She guessed that she had done 4140 words? She would soon find out.
4255 words! 23.6 wpm
Saturday, November 23, 2013
FB comment clippings (and account of processing)
Sat. 11/23/13 2:29p
2:41p dragged clippings to folder - 34 clippings of FB comments, not including one's not on the laptop
go to edit on the photo (in FB). I think you can turn it around right in FB. Happened to me too.
this is so sad M for all of you. I cannot imagine having to deal with so much politiking on a regular basis. Wishing you peace for this.
Oh my - this is a surprise! My printer/scanner is down. It will take me a bit to get machinery back in order. For now I will take this to the library to see how good a scan I can get there. How lucky you are R to have been able to work with the babies. They are so irresistable - so cute.
Yes! I actually did see that come across my newsfeed. I do think it is photoshopped. I like the idea of the image, the visual, but knowing it is not natural somehow bugs me if I think people are believing it is natural.
some writers write their stories just to see where they end up (ie.Stephen King). So maybe you have two stories going, or even more.
I thought you could always make a quote as long as you give all the source. That is all part of the fair use aspect. You are just using a little piece of it. You may not use a quote to sell/market something with - that is what 'commercial' use is. Google the question. Refer to what you learned about footnotes and bibliographies in school (hopefully).
Missed you J and D! That weather was something for awhile too. You see those empty spots in the display? That is where your drawings were missing!
If you have a real working typewriter, you could type on that, take pics of the pages, (or photocopies), and then use ocr program to convert to digital text. There is also an app for it. I wish it would do handwriting. And you may not type fast enough to make it worthwhile. But...?
What a wonderful pic - you are both intent on whatever - the photo really has caught each of you in being.
Yay S! Thank you! Insurance is Gambling, a lottery. And that it should be mandatory to buy a lottery ticket just because we dare not call it a TAX??? When are we going to see that?
After doing a huge amount in a short time and getting caught up, the regular amount needed will be like a piece of cake!
wow - that child has been watching how the grownup holds the tool! So neat. Little ones are able to do so much at a very young age, and know so much more than we think they do?
It is such an amazing thing that you are perhaps the only direct link I have with my early childhood. It is so magical this way. Thank you for this. It is wonderful to have found these ties to people that were so important growing up.
A you could be a model for flowered/Hawaiian shirts. They look so good on you and you in them. How you wear your handsome son may be part of it too though!
M thank you! Such a proud achievement being able to cut my own hair! - that was the most important part of it. My mother used to cut my hair and one time she messed up. That was it. Lots of practice on myself and my sisters, whenever they happened to let me. Cutting the littlest brother's hair was tricky because he was young enough to storm off in a fury in the middle of the haircut if the hair got pulled once too much. Not easy to coax him back after that!
Oh my goodness!! Thank you all. This is another accidental stumbling upon a pic. This is already at least four years old, so not sure how much it resembles me today!
A- all the 'little sisters' were so important and so treasured - that was all part of being friends together. We were just as lucky to have you as a so called 'little sister' (as I was with my own dear 'little siblings') Love to you all! So nice to hear from everyone overnight!
Did I invite you B to that thing in TX? I thought I requested friending yesterday because I wanted to share an artist's pic that I wanted S to see. I still have to find that again so I can message it to you! I'll go find it now.
And yes, a 5K stint can be done in a day, but may leave you too spent to tackle the next day's worth.
I'm finding a half hour timer alarm really helps. Just focus on writing until it rings. Invariably it will ring when you are heavy into writing. Then you reset for another session and continue. If that is too long, make it shorter. Sweeten the pot by putting down little marks, gold stars, what ever you need to give yourself a tiny mental boost as you go. It makes the process be 'now' instead of 'oh my gosh, look how far I have to go!' . Can you imagine if we had to think about eating in terms of how much food we need to eat in a month? etc., etc.? Just a little at a time will get you there, or at least that much closer than if you had done nothing. There is nothing to lose. It is all practice. It adds up. As soon as you can, print out what you have just so you can see the pile grow.
B-1 - you probably would not remember me. We did not know each other in school. Your Mom/B came regularly to clean at my house. That soon switched to her coming to make her wonderful fried chicken. My mom, K D, and B would always chat. Your Mom would tell my Mom, and they both would have a chuckle, about all the girls who were throwing themselves at you - yes you were a handsome fellow growing up. We may have been in homeroom together one year, but I don't remember. I only knew you by sight. I don't think you knew me. You are in my 1968 yearbook as a Senior in that class (my class too). I did a lot of work on that yearbook - the psychedelic art. I was very much involved with art. For a few years I had a short mod hair style that I cut myself. At one point I wore some crazy psychedlic big earrings made from blown out eggshells (like easter eggs). In my FB pics is a pic of me from high school 'posing' wearing a short dress typical for that year. I could tag you in it so you can see it, then untag it.
I remember that B went through an agonizing spell with gall bladder stones. Your Mom was very dear to us. The family moved to Michigan my second year in college, fall of 1969. I was in Philly at art school then. We all basically lost touch with Montclair for a long time.
My mother passed away last summer. She had been living in Brooklyn for the past few years. Thank goodness she went before hurricane Sandy hit.
We were lucky to know B. Tell me how things are when you can.
Best to you,
C
So wild - always in awe of these people, such a great life affirming example! I imagine that most of these real 'old timers' are extremely young. How uplifting to hear. Thanks to all of you!
heck oh heck - fb shows things in the news feed one moment, you take a momentary action to clear some notifications, and poof, whatever you intended to check next on the news feed has been deemed of no consequence for you. But oh how important those other things are that keep repeating themselves because others are liking them or what not....rant to be withheld..
yay! FB's email posting option is back in business. The demo drawing I just posted by email is good for coloring!
Yesterday evening I was also not able to post a pic by email to my artist page - not from the library nor from home. I may not be able to test that now. That could be further indication of work FB is doing.
it in my mind, but my mind's vision might have played tricks on me. It struck me enough that I looked at it again to see if I was really seeing that. I also checked to see if we had any friends in common. No. It does not say it now. It is just the usual suggestion to invite your friends. Ohh - they/FB run tests all the time to see if they get any response from various things. This could have been a test or a mistake test. That is my idea for now.
A 'like' is a share, but a 'share' lets you add your own caption/take on the content. Thumb icon disappears soon. See the new buttons here:
CK
Has there been a change in 'liking' a page? Does it now mean you are also sending out invites to your friends to 'like' that page, but you don't know that you are? I just liked a page and found a list of my friends to whom an invite had been sent. There is no connection between the page and the friends. It could be the original inviter is doing that inviting....
I have not tested this yet, but I did read/hear somewhere in some tech news that something had changed about the FB 'liking'. My suspicions are raised but not yet confirmed. Keep your eyes open!
The Nano write-in leader in Rkd gave the suggestion to have a couple tricks handy to revert to whenever that happens. Something like just turning to writing conversation happening at a dinner table. I don't remember what she called it. But it sounds like it does just what Breanne says will happen if you just keep writing. Everyone is different in what they get out of these experiences though - what approaches work or don't work for you.
There was an NPR piece today about veterans finding work as firemen. The ones interviewed also love being part of a team, the sense of comradery, to be able to help people. The sense of purpose in one's work. I think perhaps we all want such things to a certain degree. May we all keep moving towards that.
a lot like the circle abstractions we just did in kids art class
2:54 pm c. 30 items compiled?
1805 words - hmm, not a number to be sneezed at. Falling asleep doing it though
Incomplete- clippings from Thurs 11/07/13 thru today 72 wpm?
1805/25 min =72 wpm
But 3:20 pm to change names to initials and get the docs synched. I wanted a copy of each
Sat. 11/23/13 2:29p
2:41p dragged clippings to folder - 34 clippings of FB comments, not including one's not on the laptop
go to edit on the photo (in FB). I think you can turn it around right in FB. Happened to me too.
this is so sad M for all of you. I cannot imagine having to deal with so much politiking on a regular basis. Wishing you peace for this.
Oh my - this is a surprise! My printer/scanner is down. It will take me a bit to get machinery back in order. For now I will take this to the library to see how good a scan I can get there. How lucky you are R to have been able to work with the babies. They are so irresistable - so cute.
Yes! I actually did see that come across my newsfeed. I do think it is photoshopped. I like the idea of the image, the visual, but knowing it is not natural somehow bugs me if I think people are believing it is natural.
some writers write their stories just to see where they end up (ie.Stephen King). So maybe you have two stories going, or even more.
I thought you could always make a quote as long as you give all the source. That is all part of the fair use aspect. You are just using a little piece of it. You may not use a quote to sell/market something with - that is what 'commercial' use is. Google the question. Refer to what you learned about footnotes and bibliographies in school (hopefully).
Missed you J and D! That weather was something for awhile too. You see those empty spots in the display? That is where your drawings were missing!
If you have a real working typewriter, you could type on that, take pics of the pages, (or photocopies), and then use ocr program to convert to digital text. There is also an app for it. I wish it would do handwriting. And you may not type fast enough to make it worthwhile. But...?
What a wonderful pic - you are both intent on whatever - the photo really has caught each of you in being.
Yay S! Thank you! Insurance is Gambling, a lottery. And that it should be mandatory to buy a lottery ticket just because we dare not call it a TAX??? When are we going to see that?
After doing a huge amount in a short time and getting caught up, the regular amount needed will be like a piece of cake!
wow - that child has been watching how the grownup holds the tool! So neat. Little ones are able to do so much at a very young age, and know so much more than we think they do?
It is such an amazing thing that you are perhaps the only direct link I have with my early childhood. It is so magical this way. Thank you for this. It is wonderful to have found these ties to people that were so important growing up.
A you could be a model for flowered/Hawaiian shirts. They look so good on you and you in them. How you wear your handsome son may be part of it too though!
M thank you! Such a proud achievement being able to cut my own hair! - that was the most important part of it. My mother used to cut my hair and one time she messed up. That was it. Lots of practice on myself and my sisters, whenever they happened to let me. Cutting the littlest brother's hair was tricky because he was young enough to storm off in a fury in the middle of the haircut if the hair got pulled once too much. Not easy to coax him back after that!
Oh my goodness!! Thank you all. This is another accidental stumbling upon a pic. This is already at least four years old, so not sure how much it resembles me today!
A- all the 'little sisters' were so important and so treasured - that was all part of being friends together. We were just as lucky to have you as a so called 'little sister' (as I was with my own dear 'little siblings') Love to you all! So nice to hear from everyone overnight!
Did I invite you B to that thing in TX? I thought I requested friending yesterday because I wanted to share an artist's pic that I wanted S to see. I still have to find that again so I can message it to you! I'll go find it now.
And yes, a 5K stint can be done in a day, but may leave you too spent to tackle the next day's worth.
I'm finding a half hour timer alarm really helps. Just focus on writing until it rings. Invariably it will ring when you are heavy into writing. Then you reset for another session and continue. If that is too long, make it shorter. Sweeten the pot by putting down little marks, gold stars, what ever you need to give yourself a tiny mental boost as you go. It makes the process be 'now' instead of 'oh my gosh, look how far I have to go!' . Can you imagine if we had to think about eating in terms of how much food we need to eat in a month? etc., etc.? Just a little at a time will get you there, or at least that much closer than if you had done nothing. There is nothing to lose. It is all practice. It adds up. As soon as you can, print out what you have just so you can see the pile grow.
B-1 - you probably would not remember me. We did not know each other in school. Your Mom/B came regularly to clean at my house. That soon switched to her coming to make her wonderful fried chicken. My mom, K D, and B would always chat. Your Mom would tell my Mom, and they both would have a chuckle, about all the girls who were throwing themselves at you - yes you were a handsome fellow growing up. We may have been in homeroom together one year, but I don't remember. I only knew you by sight. I don't think you knew me. You are in my 1968 yearbook as a Senior in that class (my class too). I did a lot of work on that yearbook - the psychedelic art. I was very much involved with art. For a few years I had a short mod hair style that I cut myself. At one point I wore some crazy psychedlic big earrings made from blown out eggshells (like easter eggs). In my FB pics is a pic of me from high school 'posing' wearing a short dress typical for that year. I could tag you in it so you can see it, then untag it.
I remember that B went through an agonizing spell with gall bladder stones. Your Mom was very dear to us. The family moved to Michigan my second year in college, fall of 1969. I was in Philly at art school then. We all basically lost touch with Montclair for a long time.
My mother passed away last summer. She had been living in Brooklyn for the past few years. Thank goodness she went before hurricane Sandy hit.
We were lucky to know B. Tell me how things are when you can.
Best to you,
C
So wild - always in awe of these people, such a great life affirming example! I imagine that most of these real 'old timers' are extremely young. How uplifting to hear. Thanks to all of you!
heck oh heck - fb shows things in the news feed one moment, you take a momentary action to clear some notifications, and poof, whatever you intended to check next on the news feed has been deemed of no consequence for you. But oh how important those other things are that keep repeating themselves because others are liking them or what not....rant to be withheld..
yay! FB's email posting option is back in business. The demo drawing I just posted by email is good for coloring!
Yesterday evening I was also not able to post a pic by email to my artist page - not from the library nor from home. I may not be able to test that now. That could be further indication of work FB is doing.
it in my mind, but my mind's vision might have played tricks on me. It struck me enough that I looked at it again to see if I was really seeing that. I also checked to see if we had any friends in common. No. It does not say it now. It is just the usual suggestion to invite your friends. Ohh - they/FB run tests all the time to see if they get any response from various things. This could have been a test or a mistake test. That is my idea for now.
A 'like' is a share, but a 'share' lets you add your own caption/take on the content. Thumb icon disappears soon. See the new buttons here:
CK
Has there been a change in 'liking' a page? Does it now mean you are also sending out invites to your friends to 'like' that page, but you don't know that you are? I just liked a page and found a list of my friends to whom an invite had been sent. There is no connection between the page and the friends. It could be the original inviter is doing that inviting....
I have not tested this yet, but I did read/hear somewhere in some tech news that something had changed about the FB 'liking'. My suspicions are raised but not yet confirmed. Keep your eyes open!
The Nano write-in leader in Rkd gave the suggestion to have a couple tricks handy to revert to whenever that happens. Something like just turning to writing conversation happening at a dinner table. I don't remember what she called it. But it sounds like it does just what Breanne says will happen if you just keep writing. Everyone is different in what they get out of these experiences though - what approaches work or don't work for you.
There was an NPR piece today about veterans finding work as firemen. The ones interviewed also love being part of a team, the sense of comradery, to be able to help people. The sense of purpose in one's work. I think perhaps we all want such things to a certain degree. May we all keep moving towards that.
a lot like the circle abstractions we just did in kids art class
2:54 pm c. 30 items compiled?
1805 words - hmm, not a number to be sneezed at. Falling asleep doing it though
Incomplete- clippings from Thurs 11/07/13 thru today 72 wpm?
1805/25 min =72 wpm
But 3:20 pm to change names to initials and get the docs synched. I wanted a copy of each
Thursday, November 21, 2013
"Interruptions were not a good thing for this writing..."
"...that they were all heading to a sudden demise of writing by hand, ..."
Thurs. 11/21/13 10:15 am
It was the next day, and it felt to the Wrimoer as if she had only just gotten done sitting with her long stint of writing that had been longer than she had intended. It was time to write again. She had told herself this time she had to have some topics on hand to write about. One could not sit there churning out words if one had to stop to think of ideas. Now she had also fallen into the trap of wanting to keep up her word per minute rate. These counting and rates aspects were constraints on one's ability to write. They brought the wrong spirit to the venture. There was still an advantage to meeting the demands of the project. She recognized that, but that did not stop her from just wanting to get the project over with. And that was what drove her to try for more writing at a sitting rather than maintaining a more comfortable pace.
It did seem like she felt more productive overall just for having worked on the writing session almost first thing after breakfast. That was a useful strategy. She was already conditioned to this routine. She looked forward to it. She just did not want to have to do so much of it. She did not want to write without being able to stop to think. She wanted to be able to be reflective while writing. She wanted to be able to stop to remember things. In this manner of writing one could not stop for anything. The pressure to keep the typing fingers moving was too great. She could pretty well follow most constraints that she imposed on herself it looked like. There was nothing really saying one could not stop to think or remember. It was just she herself wanting to compete with herself over writing straight out.
This was a bit like the drawing exercise she gave her students where they were to draw the subject with a continuous line. They were not to lift the pencil. If they needed to get back to a certain spot, that pencil line was to backtrack to the spot rather than to be lifted to the spot. This was a good practice for them though very few were willing to assimilate it further into their drawing methods.
She could not or would not prevent herself from correcting her typing as she went along. She knew this constant self correcting was counter productive with flow. It was a constant stumbling of sorts. One of these days she would have to do typing exercises against that. It was one thing to learn to type that way with transcription typing but another to type that way in capturing one's own thoughts.
It was the flowing aspect that she liked so much in writing longhand. One could feel the flow of one's hand and pencil as it made those lovely marks on the paper. It felt physically very satisfying to her. She had longed for some kind of digital application that would or could transcribe one' s longhand writing into digital text. Now she believed it was too late for that to be developed. The market for that usage was rapidly shrinking as less and less people were learning how to write in longhand. The kids could not even print properly anymore. Their writing was so often illegible.
When she had learned that these skills were being left out of school curriculums more and more frequently, it had hit her that the time was not that far off when a whole generation of people would suddenly not have the skills to write by hand easily. This realization shocked and horrified her. She could only see the worst of this scenario. There would be times that there was suddenly no power to drive the digital technology, whether because of widespread disasters or whatever reasons. Such times were not the times to suddenly try to learn to write by hand. One needed to know how to do it already. Whether it was to communicate over space or over time, people needed to have ways to do so.
What an irony in the history of the Bolshevik takeover of the Czarist regime that she had heard on the radio several weeks ago. Perhaps it had been the anniversary of that event. The irony was that when the Bolsheviks came to take prisoners of the government officials or aristocrats hiding out in one of the palaces, those captive's had to write their own arrest warrants, (or was it their death warrants), because the Bolsheviks were all peasants who could not read or write. To what distorted manner of
10:45am alarm reset
collaboration and cooperation will Man engage in but not see the absurdity of a situation. Here they were collaborating and almost complicit with each other, though their political stances were that they were totally opposed to each other.
That was certainly not a good proof that people needed to be able to universally write, but it was a situation that illustrated such an unbalance. And it was also an example of what happens when a people do not see to it that the benefits of life are widely available.
Man so far seemed to only be able to envision that either one had a system where it was each man for himself, or one had a system where everything had to be automatically shared. There was a constant conflict over these black and white options. Neither side or option could see that both were needed.
She would have to think too hard on this issue, so she had to put it aside for now. She knew she was getting into deeper waters of the logic and argument. This was not the time to sort it out. She had already written sentences that she had not given enough thought to to be able to judge whether they even made sense, or whether she even believed them.
When she had raised the issue with others that they were all heading to a sudden demise of writing by hand, people had not seemed to see what that could mean. The came back with reassurances that they were seeing a resurgance of people wanting to know how to do things by hand. They seemed to think that these numbers of people were enough to supply what was needed. She did not see it that way. She felt the numbers of those people were small potatoes compared to all of the people who just would not know how to write by hand. She assumed they would at least be able to read. But they would not be able to read handwriting either.
That was of less concern to her. It was the idea that one needed to be able to put down thoughts, memories, and accounts when they happened, not at a much later time when such histories had had a chance to fade. There would be millions upon millions of people who would not be able to write she believed.
That was frightening enough. That people did not recognize the coming situation was almost as bad. The answer was often, and she had heard this from the mouths of educators, but do they need to learn to write by hand anymore? They all had such faith that all things electronic and digital would always be in existence. It was perhaps nice in one way that they had such faith. But she wished that they could then also recognize to what extent they were living in faith. Having faith that electronics would always just be there was simply assuming that things just always worked the way one wanted them to.
This held another irony. On the one hand one had the faith that life would carry on the way you expected it to, in this case electronics and technologies would always be widely available; but on the other hand everyone operated on the main premise that one had to gather riches for one's self and one's own, assumedly because of the general assumption that one needed such protections from the forces of the world or the universe. Here everyone was actually holding a common intrinsic belief that life would provide, while also holding a belief that one had to scramble exactly because life would not provide. Would not life, the living of life, be so much more pleasurable and meaningful if one could see that one was operating on the assumption that one lived in grace?
11:12 am
She was getting edgy. The timer would ring soon. She was hitting a dry spell and again wanted to stop with the argument she had been making. It was not an argument, but a -----------. She would have to think of that word later.
There had been a picture on the social media of a family gathering
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of a friend from long ago. The friend was the sister of a long ago boyfriend. The Wrimoer had long ago lost touch with that boyfriend from yesteryear. The family photo showed all these siblings in a recent gathering. It appeared that here was the son of the long ago boyfriend, looking a bit as he had looked. And there was the long ago boyfriend in his aging appearance. This was over and over the oddest experience to see people aging.
Some people hardly changed. Just their haircolor changed. Others had gained weight along with hair color changing. Such weight gain made for a lot of structural changes. Some had really changed their personnas, their identities, and were in some cases not that aware of being such different people. There were others who had blossomed into such richer versions of themselves - they were as older people so grown or developed into far more attractive versions of themselves while still becoming 'aged' people.
In times past one would not have been able to be aware of such changes. For one thing one was not in general migrating away from one's homeland. If one did so, one could so easily come home to see how people had changed. There were not the technological means to be able to capture the changes. As one could not watch a flower grow, neither could one watch one's peers changing. Ancient ones were always a functioning part of the society as were the youngest. Everyone had to work together just to survive.
The Wrimoer found herself wandering off into another 'argument'. She put that one aside too. Perhaps she would get back to these in another time and place. What was the next thing she could write about?
On a more mundane level, their had been a surprising response by several people to a painting she had shared on the social media. This was what she called a 'direct painting' as she had not other way to describe it. It was watercolor painting without an under drawing. The shapes and pattern she found in the reference images were painted directly almost as if being cut out of paper. One created fine white lines in the process rather than dark outlines. This meant painting the shapes cleanly. She found it a very satisfying way to paint. One could really watch the beautiful shapes of paint and water as the appeared, but also the clean fine white spaces between the paint areas. It meant having to be fairly accurate in getting the shapes down right off the bat, but if one attended to the beauty of the shapes just for their own beauty, one had an easier time of capturing them.
In this case the image was of a pair of rascally type wild animals. She had composed the image as she went along just by combining these two creatures from two different reference photos. She had also been talking too much while painting she thought... it was during her lesson from the previous week...
11:40 am (she was getting edgy and physically uncomfortable sitting there - she needed a break)
The posting of the painting had received a comment asking how much a print of it cost. The Wrimoer had even been reluctant to use this subject for class material because she knew that some people had conflicts with this creature. Conflicts often meant prejudices against willingness to work with them as subjects. But the Wrimoer enjoyed these creatures though they were often such nuisances.
She had answered the price question while trying not
11:45 am alarm - break
3:31 resume
It was hours later. The Wrimoer was not feeling well but wanted to continue where she had left off. After such a break though, such an interruption, it was hard to return to the topic at hand. She would leave it for a little while.
In the meantime she had made herself a hot lemon drink and was sitting with a hot water bottle. The heater in the apartment was running hot again as soon as the sun had dropped.
If she was not going to pick up where she had left off on the previous story, she had nothing pressing to say.
One thing she wanted to note somewhere. It was of a frivolous nature but was something that kept bugging her. She wanted to list her pet peeves about the tv series she had been watching for the past few months via dvd's from the library - the Madmen series. The series itself, the storylines, the acting, most of the nostalgia for the times she found for the most part enjoyable. There were discrepancies that had bugged her though and she wanted to get them noted down in one place. Would she have the patience to do that now? It could take more describing than she was willing to do.
The Draper family in the early part of the show, had too old a fridge for that time and financial standing. Yes, there had been an upgrade and redecoration at a certain point, but the Wrimoer could remember how her family's kitchen had been remodeled when they had moved to the suburbs from NYC in 1961. Even the apartment they had moved from had already had a refrigerator upgrade.
Several characters' names were all wrong for that time. The little girl Sally - her name was from the generation before. When the Wrimoer was growing up there had only been one Sally in the graduating class of c. 500. And that person had been a refugee from an entirely different culture.
Then there was the character Meghan - another name that was very out of place. That name began becoming popular in the late 70's among the baby boomers. And such a name from a French family, or French Canadian family? Perhaps that was a special name in that culture but these were not French Canadians who spoke French Canadian. They spoke with proper French accents. It made no sense.
The Wrimoer also found it surprising that so many apartments were being bought as coops and condos in that time frame. She thought that had not yet started to become so popular - not until the mid seventies. She had looked it up and apparently the practice had been in existence quite awhile. How popular or widespread it was then, she had not been able to find out.
3:56 pm
Now came the yearning for the time to be over. That was all she was able to remember of her pet peeves about the show.
She just wanted to be done with all of this. She was too close to the end to stop though.
Yesterday's trip to the library to get her painting scanned - had she gotten that far in telling the story yet?- had her seeing that one needed to go out just to find stories. Or, one could just make them up. Just now she wanted to do neither. Nothing nothing nothing.
She was dawdling and clockwatching, just waiting for the alarm to ring. Perhaps she should have put on the radio in hopes of a story idea or something
There
4:02 pm alarm rang at last but she reset it - for more torture.
If she really needed to stop she would stop. Maybe she would get lucky and get an idea. The writing group leader called her strategy for getting out of a stuck spot, a 'writing ninja'. One was to pull up any number of standard scenarios that one could put to use to start the writing.
For instance - just start writing about an imaginary dinner conversation. Who was at the table? What were they eating? Why were they there? What might they be talking about? What were their relationships?
She had to pull such conversations out of the air with her kids classes. The typical way she did it was to have them guessing what the day's topic was. But if someone knew right off the bat, she had to hold them at bay with their answer because the game would be over then. The trick was to find ways to get everyone involved, especially the shy ones. Some people were only shy when put on the spot, when they felt they were looking foolish. The fewer people that were in the class, the group, the more reserved everything seemed to get. The parents almost always pressured their kids to either speak up or to give an answer that the parent had fed them. This drove the Wrimoer nuts. Such parenting behavior did nothing to develop a child's confidence and everything to encourage dependence. One had to wonder what the parents' true motives were when the helped their kids.
Parents helped their kids it seemed more because the kids were an extension of themselves. They could not bear to see kids hurt or trying things for themselves. The children were held as so precious. They were not allowed to make mistakes and figure things out for themselves. It seemd as if every behavior a child needed to grow out of was reinforced rather than weaned from.
Much as with the loss of writing by hand skills that she thought would be hitting everywhere at once at a certain point, she was seeing how all these kids growing up in this manner without learning how to stand on their own two feet, would be hitting adulthood at the same time. This was a huge demographic of people. What would happen across the land if so many people could not fend for themselves, could not think on their own, did not know how to do things, did not know how to act in a group or facet to face? It did not matter to her how it would affect the country. It did matter to her how it would affect people as a whole, the people who were around each other.
She had felt that at least in doing the kids' art class there was plenty of work to be done in that context. It was troublesome to her though that the class was now as poorly attended as it was. It did not give her the opportunity to do the work she wanted to do in it. The context of such small classes she did not feel was a good environment for teaching. She believed that class sizes should not be small.
Yes it gave a certain amount of intimacy but it was also insular. There was not enough diversity in that context. Some people liked that they felt as if they were getting a private class. She had grown up as a city kid in an apartment building full of people - all kinds of people.
Classes when she was growing up were large. When she had been a substitute teacher in New York inner city schools, the classes were large. Her last job in the school system had been taking over as the 5th grade classroom teacher of a troublesome group. There 33 students in that roster. They did not all come to class at the same time because some of them had lousy attendance records. They were part of the class though.
It had been such a hard job and she had given it up after a month, when she found herself getting very sick. She felt the work was for someone better trained and equipped for it than herself. Now she wondered if perhaps she could do it. But she was no longer a person willing to be part of the dynamics of being part of an institution and the politicking that required. She preferred to do her work as an independent
4:32pm alarm reset 10 min
.... she'd lost the train of thought she was on....
4:34 pm so she would stop before the idling would lower her word per minute rate
4:35 pm
3488 words
Well, here she was at the same point as the previous day, too close to 4000 words to stop here. She would have to continue.
Interruptions were not a good thing for this writing. She had been using the alarm as a way to spur herself to at least write a little bit. That was still a good strategy. But now that she saw how interrupting it could be, she questioned that too.
Back to the dinner conversation and how she had to make conversations happen with the people that came to the kids art classes. Why did she do that before the actual drawing session?
4:42 alarm reset 30 min.
It was a way of getting people engaged, warmed up to each other, involved in the subject matter. It was a kind of game she played with the attendees to get them to elicit first their guesses as to the subject, and then ideas for what might be a picture of the subject. The hard problem was when no one seemed to have any ideas and just sat there.
She also had never liked having to call on people. If there were a lot of people wanting to answer one had to choose. If there were a few, they were usually the ones who wanted to show off that they knew the answer. If one let them answer then it became their show and everyone else either shut down or withdrew. It just did not work. There had to be ways to get everyone participating in the conversation. There were always people who wanted to tell their story, but those people were never good enough at telling it so that others would not get bored and shut down. They only knew they wanted to tell their story to whomever was listening. They were oblivious to the needs of the whole group. The teacher had to find ways to deal with this in a face saving manner.
The Wrimoer wondered, how was it possible that rock concerts or mega churches could handle huge audiences whereby everyone got something out of the experience. These were the skills that classroom teachers needed to learn in running their classrooms. A classroom was a small community, a structured environment for a group experience. It held many moments of 'theater' or 'show' like experiences.
4:54pm Would she be able to hold out? The heater had been going strong and she was getting overheated from it.
What did those huge church gatherings do to keep all those people acting as a group? There was music and rhythm. Yes, Keith Richards had told of that in an interview when he described having to deal with the dangerous situation developing at one of their concerts. He had had to get a beat going to get the audience back in synch. That was also the purpose of military marches and parades. That was why one had drummers. They kept a beat going and everyone began falling into the beat. Not that this was a way one needed to be, but it was something to understand about how people function naturally.
It was back to the bottom of the barrel again. She was starting to wonder if she was coming down with a fever with her not feeling well. The next day she had a couple of press releases to write for the December art programs The press deadlines were about 4-5 pm. She had at least gotten the adult classes scheduled in. It was however looking like it would be the first December in quite a while that she might have to do 5 sessions for the kids classes. Two of those sessions were just before the holidays, and at an hour when the town was basically shut down. it would mean coming in to do a class for most likely no one. She was anticipating that already.
Since she usually had less classes in December, she had no idea what she would do in the extra two classes. Yes, she knew what topic do with the New Year's Eve class. She had done that before. That was a hard one to draw - Old Father Time bringing in the New Year child. So that was where the symbol of the baby Jesus came from. He was the New Year's child. All this time that connection had never occurred to her. Father Christmas had probably been Old Father Time as well.
Just a few minutes before the alarm would ring.
She had found the coloring booklets for December, both as promoting the kids art classes and the one for people not in the area. She had that at the ready to use. That pleased her.
For the press releases, she would start by just copying last years, even for the art. Once that was done, she would see about finding the art she had made during last year's classes and get that prepped for use.
5:12pm alarm rings - That is all.
4325 words
"...that they were all heading to a sudden demise of writing by hand, ..."
Thurs. 11/21/13 10:15 am
It was the next day, and it felt to the Wrimoer as if she had only just gotten done sitting with her long stint of writing that had been longer than she had intended. It was time to write again. She had told herself this time she had to have some topics on hand to write about. One could not sit there churning out words if one had to stop to think of ideas. Now she had also fallen into the trap of wanting to keep up her word per minute rate. These counting and rates aspects were constraints on one's ability to write. They brought the wrong spirit to the venture. There was still an advantage to meeting the demands of the project. She recognized that, but that did not stop her from just wanting to get the project over with. And that was what drove her to try for more writing at a sitting rather than maintaining a more comfortable pace.
It did seem like she felt more productive overall just for having worked on the writing session almost first thing after breakfast. That was a useful strategy. She was already conditioned to this routine. She looked forward to it. She just did not want to have to do so much of it. She did not want to write without being able to stop to think. She wanted to be able to be reflective while writing. She wanted to be able to stop to remember things. In this manner of writing one could not stop for anything. The pressure to keep the typing fingers moving was too great. She could pretty well follow most constraints that she imposed on herself it looked like. There was nothing really saying one could not stop to think or remember. It was just she herself wanting to compete with herself over writing straight out.
This was a bit like the drawing exercise she gave her students where they were to draw the subject with a continuous line. They were not to lift the pencil. If they needed to get back to a certain spot, that pencil line was to backtrack to the spot rather than to be lifted to the spot. This was a good practice for them though very few were willing to assimilate it further into their drawing methods.
She could not or would not prevent herself from correcting her typing as she went along. She knew this constant self correcting was counter productive with flow. It was a constant stumbling of sorts. One of these days she would have to do typing exercises against that. It was one thing to learn to type that way with transcription typing but another to type that way in capturing one's own thoughts.
It was the flowing aspect that she liked so much in writing longhand. One could feel the flow of one's hand and pencil as it made those lovely marks on the paper. It felt physically very satisfying to her. She had longed for some kind of digital application that would or could transcribe one' s longhand writing into digital text. Now she believed it was too late for that to be developed. The market for that usage was rapidly shrinking as less and less people were learning how to write in longhand. The kids could not even print properly anymore. Their writing was so often illegible.
When she had learned that these skills were being left out of school curriculums more and more frequently, it had hit her that the time was not that far off when a whole generation of people would suddenly not have the skills to write by hand easily. This realization shocked and horrified her. She could only see the worst of this scenario. There would be times that there was suddenly no power to drive the digital technology, whether because of widespread disasters or whatever reasons. Such times were not the times to suddenly try to learn to write by hand. One needed to know how to do it already. Whether it was to communicate over space or over time, people needed to have ways to do so.
What an irony in the history of the Bolshevik takeover of the Czarist regime that she had heard on the radio several weeks ago. Perhaps it had been the anniversary of that event. The irony was that when the Bolsheviks came to take prisoners of the government officials or aristocrats hiding out in one of the palaces, those captive's had to write their own arrest warrants, (or was it their death warrants), because the Bolsheviks were all peasants who could not read or write. To what distorted manner of
10:45am alarm reset
collaboration and cooperation will Man engage in but not see the absurdity of a situation. Here they were collaborating and almost complicit with each other, though their political stances were that they were totally opposed to each other.
That was certainly not a good proof that people needed to be able to universally write, but it was a situation that illustrated such an unbalance. And it was also an example of what happens when a people do not see to it that the benefits of life are widely available.
Man so far seemed to only be able to envision that either one had a system where it was each man for himself, or one had a system where everything had to be automatically shared. There was a constant conflict over these black and white options. Neither side or option could see that both were needed.
She would have to think too hard on this issue, so she had to put it aside for now. She knew she was getting into deeper waters of the logic and argument. This was not the time to sort it out. She had already written sentences that she had not given enough thought to to be able to judge whether they even made sense, or whether she even believed them.
When she had raised the issue with others that they were all heading to a sudden demise of writing by hand, people had not seemed to see what that could mean. The came back with reassurances that they were seeing a resurgance of people wanting to know how to do things by hand. They seemed to think that these numbers of people were enough to supply what was needed. She did not see it that way. She felt the numbers of those people were small potatoes compared to all of the people who just would not know how to write by hand. She assumed they would at least be able to read. But they would not be able to read handwriting either.
That was of less concern to her. It was the idea that one needed to be able to put down thoughts, memories, and accounts when they happened, not at a much later time when such histories had had a chance to fade. There would be millions upon millions of people who would not be able to write she believed.
That was frightening enough. That people did not recognize the coming situation was almost as bad. The answer was often, and she had heard this from the mouths of educators, but do they need to learn to write by hand anymore? They all had such faith that all things electronic and digital would always be in existence. It was perhaps nice in one way that they had such faith. But she wished that they could then also recognize to what extent they were living in faith. Having faith that electronics would always just be there was simply assuming that things just always worked the way one wanted them to.
This held another irony. On the one hand one had the faith that life would carry on the way you expected it to, in this case electronics and technologies would always be widely available; but on the other hand everyone operated on the main premise that one had to gather riches for one's self and one's own, assumedly because of the general assumption that one needed such protections from the forces of the world or the universe. Here everyone was actually holding a common intrinsic belief that life would provide, while also holding a belief that one had to scramble exactly because life would not provide. Would not life, the living of life, be so much more pleasurable and meaningful if one could see that one was operating on the assumption that one lived in grace?
11:12 am
She was getting edgy. The timer would ring soon. She was hitting a dry spell and again wanted to stop with the argument she had been making. It was not an argument, but a -----------. She would have to think of that word later.
There had been a picture on the social media of a family gathering
11:15a alarm reset
of a friend from long ago. The friend was the sister of a long ago boyfriend. The Wrimoer had long ago lost touch with that boyfriend from yesteryear. The family photo showed all these siblings in a recent gathering. It appeared that here was the son of the long ago boyfriend, looking a bit as he had looked. And there was the long ago boyfriend in his aging appearance. This was over and over the oddest experience to see people aging.
Some people hardly changed. Just their haircolor changed. Others had gained weight along with hair color changing. Such weight gain made for a lot of structural changes. Some had really changed their personnas, their identities, and were in some cases not that aware of being such different people. There were others who had blossomed into such richer versions of themselves - they were as older people so grown or developed into far more attractive versions of themselves while still becoming 'aged' people.
In times past one would not have been able to be aware of such changes. For one thing one was not in general migrating away from one's homeland. If one did so, one could so easily come home to see how people had changed. There were not the technological means to be able to capture the changes. As one could not watch a flower grow, neither could one watch one's peers changing. Ancient ones were always a functioning part of the society as were the youngest. Everyone had to work together just to survive.
The Wrimoer found herself wandering off into another 'argument'. She put that one aside too. Perhaps she would get back to these in another time and place. What was the next thing she could write about?
On a more mundane level, their had been a surprising response by several people to a painting she had shared on the social media. This was what she called a 'direct painting' as she had not other way to describe it. It was watercolor painting without an under drawing. The shapes and pattern she found in the reference images were painted directly almost as if being cut out of paper. One created fine white lines in the process rather than dark outlines. This meant painting the shapes cleanly. She found it a very satisfying way to paint. One could really watch the beautiful shapes of paint and water as the appeared, but also the clean fine white spaces between the paint areas. It meant having to be fairly accurate in getting the shapes down right off the bat, but if one attended to the beauty of the shapes just for their own beauty, one had an easier time of capturing them.
In this case the image was of a pair of rascally type wild animals. She had composed the image as she went along just by combining these two creatures from two different reference photos. She had also been talking too much while painting she thought... it was during her lesson from the previous week...
11:40 am (she was getting edgy and physically uncomfortable sitting there - she needed a break)
The posting of the painting had received a comment asking how much a print of it cost. The Wrimoer had even been reluctant to use this subject for class material because she knew that some people had conflicts with this creature. Conflicts often meant prejudices against willingness to work with them as subjects. But the Wrimoer enjoyed these creatures though they were often such nuisances.
She had answered the price question while trying not
11:45 am alarm - break
3:31 resume
It was hours later. The Wrimoer was not feeling well but wanted to continue where she had left off. After such a break though, such an interruption, it was hard to return to the topic at hand. She would leave it for a little while.
In the meantime she had made herself a hot lemon drink and was sitting with a hot water bottle. The heater in the apartment was running hot again as soon as the sun had dropped.
If she was not going to pick up where she had left off on the previous story, she had nothing pressing to say.
One thing she wanted to note somewhere. It was of a frivolous nature but was something that kept bugging her. She wanted to list her pet peeves about the tv series she had been watching for the past few months via dvd's from the library - the Madmen series. The series itself, the storylines, the acting, most of the nostalgia for the times she found for the most part enjoyable. There were discrepancies that had bugged her though and she wanted to get them noted down in one place. Would she have the patience to do that now? It could take more describing than she was willing to do.
The Draper family in the early part of the show, had too old a fridge for that time and financial standing. Yes, there had been an upgrade and redecoration at a certain point, but the Wrimoer could remember how her family's kitchen had been remodeled when they had moved to the suburbs from NYC in 1961. Even the apartment they had moved from had already had a refrigerator upgrade.
Several characters' names were all wrong for that time. The little girl Sally - her name was from the generation before. When the Wrimoer was growing up there had only been one Sally in the graduating class of c. 500. And that person had been a refugee from an entirely different culture.
Then there was the character Meghan - another name that was very out of place. That name began becoming popular in the late 70's among the baby boomers. And such a name from a French family, or French Canadian family? Perhaps that was a special name in that culture but these were not French Canadians who spoke French Canadian. They spoke with proper French accents. It made no sense.
The Wrimoer also found it surprising that so many apartments were being bought as coops and condos in that time frame. She thought that had not yet started to become so popular - not until the mid seventies. She had looked it up and apparently the practice had been in existence quite awhile. How popular or widespread it was then, she had not been able to find out.
3:56 pm
Now came the yearning for the time to be over. That was all she was able to remember of her pet peeves about the show.
She just wanted to be done with all of this. She was too close to the end to stop though.
Yesterday's trip to the library to get her painting scanned - had she gotten that far in telling the story yet?- had her seeing that one needed to go out just to find stories. Or, one could just make them up. Just now she wanted to do neither. Nothing nothing nothing.
She was dawdling and clockwatching, just waiting for the alarm to ring. Perhaps she should have put on the radio in hopes of a story idea or something
There
4:02 pm alarm rang at last but she reset it - for more torture.
If she really needed to stop she would stop. Maybe she would get lucky and get an idea. The writing group leader called her strategy for getting out of a stuck spot, a 'writing ninja'. One was to pull up any number of standard scenarios that one could put to use to start the writing.
For instance - just start writing about an imaginary dinner conversation. Who was at the table? What were they eating? Why were they there? What might they be talking about? What were their relationships?
She had to pull such conversations out of the air with her kids classes. The typical way she did it was to have them guessing what the day's topic was. But if someone knew right off the bat, she had to hold them at bay with their answer because the game would be over then. The trick was to find ways to get everyone involved, especially the shy ones. Some people were only shy when put on the spot, when they felt they were looking foolish. The fewer people that were in the class, the group, the more reserved everything seemed to get. The parents almost always pressured their kids to either speak up or to give an answer that the parent had fed them. This drove the Wrimoer nuts. Such parenting behavior did nothing to develop a child's confidence and everything to encourage dependence. One had to wonder what the parents' true motives were when the helped their kids.
Parents helped their kids it seemed more because the kids were an extension of themselves. They could not bear to see kids hurt or trying things for themselves. The children were held as so precious. They were not allowed to make mistakes and figure things out for themselves. It seemd as if every behavior a child needed to grow out of was reinforced rather than weaned from.
Much as with the loss of writing by hand skills that she thought would be hitting everywhere at once at a certain point, she was seeing how all these kids growing up in this manner without learning how to stand on their own two feet, would be hitting adulthood at the same time. This was a huge demographic of people. What would happen across the land if so many people could not fend for themselves, could not think on their own, did not know how to do things, did not know how to act in a group or facet to face? It did not matter to her how it would affect the country. It did matter to her how it would affect people as a whole, the people who were around each other.
She had felt that at least in doing the kids' art class there was plenty of work to be done in that context. It was troublesome to her though that the class was now as poorly attended as it was. It did not give her the opportunity to do the work she wanted to do in it. The context of such small classes she did not feel was a good environment for teaching. She believed that class sizes should not be small.
Yes it gave a certain amount of intimacy but it was also insular. There was not enough diversity in that context. Some people liked that they felt as if they were getting a private class. She had grown up as a city kid in an apartment building full of people - all kinds of people.
Classes when she was growing up were large. When she had been a substitute teacher in New York inner city schools, the classes were large. Her last job in the school system had been taking over as the 5th grade classroom teacher of a troublesome group. There 33 students in that roster. They did not all come to class at the same time because some of them had lousy attendance records. They were part of the class though.
It had been such a hard job and she had given it up after a month, when she found herself getting very sick. She felt the work was for someone better trained and equipped for it than herself. Now she wondered if perhaps she could do it. But she was no longer a person willing to be part of the dynamics of being part of an institution and the politicking that required. She preferred to do her work as an independent
4:32pm alarm reset 10 min
.... she'd lost the train of thought she was on....
4:34 pm so she would stop before the idling would lower her word per minute rate
4:35 pm
3488 words
Well, here she was at the same point as the previous day, too close to 4000 words to stop here. She would have to continue.
Interruptions were not a good thing for this writing. She had been using the alarm as a way to spur herself to at least write a little bit. That was still a good strategy. But now that she saw how interrupting it could be, she questioned that too.
Back to the dinner conversation and how she had to make conversations happen with the people that came to the kids art classes. Why did she do that before the actual drawing session?
4:42 alarm reset 30 min.
It was a way of getting people engaged, warmed up to each other, involved in the subject matter. It was a kind of game she played with the attendees to get them to elicit first their guesses as to the subject, and then ideas for what might be a picture of the subject. The hard problem was when no one seemed to have any ideas and just sat there.
She also had never liked having to call on people. If there were a lot of people wanting to answer one had to choose. If there were a few, they were usually the ones who wanted to show off that they knew the answer. If one let them answer then it became their show and everyone else either shut down or withdrew. It just did not work. There had to be ways to get everyone participating in the conversation. There were always people who wanted to tell their story, but those people were never good enough at telling it so that others would not get bored and shut down. They only knew they wanted to tell their story to whomever was listening. They were oblivious to the needs of the whole group. The teacher had to find ways to deal with this in a face saving manner.
The Wrimoer wondered, how was it possible that rock concerts or mega churches could handle huge audiences whereby everyone got something out of the experience. These were the skills that classroom teachers needed to learn in running their classrooms. A classroom was a small community, a structured environment for a group experience. It held many moments of 'theater' or 'show' like experiences.
4:54pm Would she be able to hold out? The heater had been going strong and she was getting overheated from it.
What did those huge church gatherings do to keep all those people acting as a group? There was music and rhythm. Yes, Keith Richards had told of that in an interview when he described having to deal with the dangerous situation developing at one of their concerts. He had had to get a beat going to get the audience back in synch. That was also the purpose of military marches and parades. That was why one had drummers. They kept a beat going and everyone began falling into the beat. Not that this was a way one needed to be, but it was something to understand about how people function naturally.
It was back to the bottom of the barrel again. She was starting to wonder if she was coming down with a fever with her not feeling well. The next day she had a couple of press releases to write for the December art programs The press deadlines were about 4-5 pm. She had at least gotten the adult classes scheduled in. It was however looking like it would be the first December in quite a while that she might have to do 5 sessions for the kids classes. Two of those sessions were just before the holidays, and at an hour when the town was basically shut down. it would mean coming in to do a class for most likely no one. She was anticipating that already.
Since she usually had less classes in December, she had no idea what she would do in the extra two classes. Yes, she knew what topic do with the New Year's Eve class. She had done that before. That was a hard one to draw - Old Father Time bringing in the New Year child. So that was where the symbol of the baby Jesus came from. He was the New Year's child. All this time that connection had never occurred to her. Father Christmas had probably been Old Father Time as well.
Just a few minutes before the alarm would ring.
She had found the coloring booklets for December, both as promoting the kids art classes and the one for people not in the area. She had that at the ready to use. That pleased her.
For the press releases, she would start by just copying last years, even for the art. Once that was done, she would see about finding the art she had made during last year's classes and get that prepped for use.
5:12pm alarm rings - That is all.
4325 words
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
"Last year's big accomplishment was that she had roasted a turkey for herself on Thanksgiving."
Wed. 11/20/13 9:54 am
It had been several days since the Wrimoer had done any writing for the month long writing challenge. She settled down to have a go at a writing stint and realized she had almost forgotten to implement the strategy that had been so helpful to her recently. She needed to set the timer for one half hour.
The last writing stint had been at the library working on their equipment. It had left her with such a bad taste in her mouth that she had not been able to get herself to write again until now. That could also have been because she had made so much headway before that with the new writing strategy, that she felt she could afford to take a break.
The night before she had been looking forward to getting to sit down for an uninterrupted morning of writing. She almost could not wait for it. She was finally at the keyboard and screen, with no idea what would come to her to write about. There did not need to be much when one was just writing whatever one's thoughts were, not worrying about a plot, not worrying about anything that way. She felt some twinges that she was cheating in doing the challenge in this way. But she had just wanted to keep her focus simple - to practice writing and generating thoughts, generating writing however unimportant. It seemed so silly.
Whenever any complicated thoughts came along, she wanted to put them aside to a time when she could think about them and write properly about them. She had even come up with a possible idea for how to contain this format of writing within another story - to put it in an envelope or another package. Hah - that could be done literally in the story, but that was not what she meant. She meant it figuratively. If she were to do that, it would probably be happening both figuratively and literally. Did that make any sense?
Even having to now think up how to put the writing she had already done inside of another story, was too much to figure out. She knew there was no way she could make up story madly at the constant pace of writing she was trying to maintain. She had to cast aside anything like that, any efforts beyond what just came to her ready to be written down.
She wondered how the other Wrimoers were able to keep up what seemed to be much greater writing paces than she kept up. There had been that article she had seen where the writer said it basically took him an hour to bang out the required daily quota of 1667 words. She could not imagine being able to do it that quickly. She could not imagine it so much so that she did not even really believe he could do it that quickly.
There were people who thought nothing of writing 5-7K words at a pop. Some of them had higher writing goals for the month. Others just wanted to see how quickly they could do the challenge. She'd read on the local group page, that there was at least one person reporting in a few days ago already that they had finished. That person had not been able to finish in past years, so the victory was especially sweet for them.
She was coming to a pause in her thoughts. So tired of what she had been talking about. She was looking at the clock, becoming a clock watcher.
That reminded her of the kids' drawing class she had taught the previous day. She wanted to tell about that, but it was too public an affair. She could not write about it in this context. She wished there was a way she could write about something and disguise it as something else. One could not stop to think of that though.
She just wanted to be done with this project. She felt so sure this was not a way for her to go about doing anything like this. She needed a smaller daily quota and it should not necessarily be daily. It just needed to be any pace that was regular so that it resulted in getting to see something grow.
She thought maybe that was what had been so important for her the last time - to be able to see something grow - whether it was whittling down the word count needed or watching the word count rise. That was what was satisfying she thought. She had ideas how that could be applied to a regular practice of art. Whether one made consistent little sketches and started piling them up, no matter how quick they were, or tackled something bigger, did not matter. If one tackled something bigger, one needed to be able to track it in a way that gave one positive reinforcement that kept spurring one on.
She had felt good that she was posting these writing efforts to a blog, but was not happy that it would stop when the project was over. If she did nothing further with it, she would be unhappy about it. How could she continue writing in that blog if that theme was over with?
The author Doris Lessing had died the other day. The public radio station played excerpts of past interviews with her. The Wrimoer was not much of a reader of fiction anymore, especially not literary fiction, so she did not know Lessing's work. She liked
10:27am alarm, reset
what Lessing had said, (perhaps it had been in advice to would be writers). She said if one was writing authentically, writing what was important to one, one did not have to worry about choosing themes to write about. That would just naturally take place. Themes would just become self-evident in the writer's work, because the writer was writing the things that mattered.
Now what would the Wrimoer write about? It had been a good couple sessions with her adult public art class and her private class. The private class had been just one student. They had not tackled the same subject as the public class had. The Wrimoer found it difficult to work in the context of giving a lesson. She either got concentrating on her own work and then felt she was neglecting her role as an instructor. Or, she could not help but want to converse when in such close proximity to another person. Then she felt she was infringing on the other person's ability to concentrate. She had discovered that there were a couple of working methods she was able to use under such conditions.
She was able to paint directly, while also conversing, if she just treated the subject as something to find beautiful shapes in. If she tried to make an accurate drawing to paint later, she found that was too hard for her to do in that context. It almost always frustrated her. To just paint in a manner that did not allow for much correction had its own freedom. She could relax and enjoy watching the shapes come out, watching the paint come out, watching the pigment ebb and flow in the waters of the little puddles she put on the paper. It did not matter whether she worked in beautiful jewel like colors, or worked in earthtones. She had managed a pencil sketch and two wash drawings or paintings of a little chipmunk feasting on a huge rose hip berry.
This was a photo she had taken a few years earlier. She had come across the chipmunk while out taking photographs on a property for a standing yearly commission for a Christmas card image. The subject was never Christmas. The subject was to be, if possible, a scene from the client's summer property. There was the chipmunk right in her path with his feast. She had been able to come up quite close taking photos of it all the while. She was perhaps two feet away before it finally abandonned its feast. That was the kind of thing she loved to be privy to.
The chipmunk had gotten in the painting too, though she had painted it quite small within the much larger scene. She would have preferred to be able to paint the chipmuch larger in the foreground and have the scene much more secondary.
The public class had worked with raccoon images for their warm up sketching and then chose from a variety of woodland critters - foxes, squirrels, chipmunks, and the raccoons. The Wrimoer had done a crayon drawing of a fox family. Her intention was just to make up a quickie scene by putting together a few of the reference drawings she had on hand. She had had to draw quickly so that she could be done by the end of class. It had almost come to a point where she was stuck in a drawing that
10:57 am alarm reset
.... did not quite make sense. This was again due to not being able to properly concentrate in that context. How were the students able to work under these circumstances? But then, they did have to stop to keep an eye out on how things were going for the others. There was always a dilemma about this for her.
She loved the comraderie and the fellowship that came from holding the classes. She also felt that the in having the larger public classes, she did not really have an obligation even to herself to make any art. And yet, she did feel that obligation. She felt she had to make some kind of art, not matter how simple, quick, or crude. And if only to illustrate some aspect of the lesson. The pressure came, she felt, from feeling that a year hence meant she had to have new images to show when it came time to write a press release.
This last press release announcing the November adult art program, she had not recycled images. She had only submitted one, as that was all she had done. Or was it that that was all she had ready for submission?
She was staring off into space quite a bit trying to gather thoughts, to think of them, to arrange them (was this a form of editing?). She was not typing non-stop. There was a ways to go with the last timer session before it would ring.
In the Western sky was a short streak moving steadily towards the horizon towards the Southwest having arced from the Northeast. She was quite sure she had seen such a streak quite often. She did not know how high in the sky this object was. Was this like whatever she saw crossing the sky at night? Was this a satellite or was it simply a jet way up there? She did not know what these things really looked like to be able to tell them apart. There was another following the same path. The white tail was relatively short. That was why she thought it must be very high. It did not leave a trail across the whole sky.
She thought perhaps she would check in with the Nanowrimo Write-In that was to be at the library that day at mid-day. She had missed the first two sessions. The first she had forgotten about, and she had not yet committed to the challenge. Neither did she want to commit to it. The second one she had been so busy writing at home that the Write-In was out of the question. It was coming on time to at least check in with the leader and let her know what she had been up to. The last session would be the day before Thanksgiving. That was always a difficult day to do anything of a normal routine.
Going out to Thanksgiving meant she would have to cook her two dishes that she always cooked for Thanksgiving. The last few years she had not cooked them because she had not needed to or had not even gone out for Thanksgiving. Every time she had bought the ingredients for these two dishes, the yams and the cranberries, but they had always ended up rotting away.
Last year's big accomplishment was that she had roasted a turkey for herself on Thanksgiving. She only bought it because they were so inexpensive to buy at this time. She almost was not able to buy it in time. The store had been out of them when she went shopping. She had had to return at a later date to get a turkey at that price. It was questionable whether it would defrost in time. It had not completely defrosted in time
11:27 am alarm reset
.... It had been so late in the day before she could put the bird in the oven. The package of innards had been frozen to the cavity. She had to wait until she could get that out before she could put the bird to roast.
The bird had barely made it under the midnight wire of Thanksgiving before it was cooked
11:31 am...another short tailed object following that path in the sky....
and then she had to get the bird carved up - aach - she did not remember just how it had all gone. She just remembered that it had been the tastiest bird she had tasted in many years. She was very proud of that, since it was the first time in 15 years that she was roasting a bird or any large piece of meat.
11:34a two objects crossing the sky, one short tailed, one a tail across the whole expanse as it moved in that path. What were these things? Was this the hour of many flights?
The Wrimoer was eager to look up her notes about last year's turkey cooking. She always wrote notes or accounts about the cooking of the yams and the cranberries. Now she worried over whether she had made an account of it. She presumed so. She had taken a lovely photo of it because she had been so proud of it. Whether she had written up how she did it, was another question.
The heater that had run all morning and making the apartment overheated, had shut down for a bit. It had not taken long to be able to feel the chill and the drafts behind her. The thermometer just behind where she sat writing now said 76ยช, but that did not mean one did not feel cold drafts just inches away from the thermometer. Any moving air gave the impression of coolness and made things feel colder than they actually were.
There were actually so many things to write about but none of them could be used in this context where she would post her writing efforts online.
When she went to the library the other day with the intention of writing there, she had advised herself that it would be good to go there exactly for the purposes of having something possibly come up that she could write about. A kind of going out in hopes that one would find something to write about. Journalism on a very small scale. She was not going out the way those wonderful Naturalist writers did. They trekked out into the 'wild' and wrote about the little dramas in the woods they came across. She supposed she could do that too to some extent.
The walk to the library was not a great distance. She had to busy herself staying warm. She could hardly stop to truly observe anything. Now she was remembering what it had been like to sit writing in the library using unfamiliar equipment. It was not so much that the equipment was unfamiliar, but that one knew one had limited time on it. Any time spent fussing with the equipment was time not spent using it. It put a crimp on things. There was always this conflict between not wanting to have one's use of a thing curtailed or restricted on the one hand, and on the other hand not wanting it to be so open ended. That ended up being a bottomless pit of time spent. Where and how did one draw the line, she wondered over and over again.
The alarm would soon be ringing. She had read a lovely article that morning explaining why one seemed to often wake up a few minutes before the alarm clock rang in the morning. It was that the 'brain' hated to be startled with the alarm ringing. The 'brain' hated to wake up that way. It much preferred waking up naturally. So it sent out whatever chemicals it needed to in order to wake one's self up ahead of the alarm. There was much more to the article and she was not sure she was even relating it properly.
11:56 am alarm (reset 10 min)
Now she was at the freedom point. She could just keep writing as she wished without setting the alarm, or she could set it for another stint. For the moment she had just set it for 10 minutes.
She knew she should get up and get herself ready for the day. Now she was feeling stubborn and resistant about that too. Whenever one finally got going on one thing, one just did not want to stop that activity.
She had the insight the previous day that the true purpose of 'practice', (she hoped she had not written about this here - she was pretty sure she had written about it only in her longhand journal), was to develop a habit for an activity. A habit that made one love doing the activity. Just the repetition of doing a thing could make one used to doing it and make one like doing it. As long as one started with small amounts of it and gave oneself some kind of positive association with it, an
12:07 pm alarm (30 min reset)
activity one found unpleasurable, could be made pleasurable over a bit of time. One got conditioned to it. She thought this was also a very useful strategy for getting anything done.
She wondered if that too had been part of what made her Nanowrimo involvement that first year so important for her. And she wondered if it had also not been a very depressing effect to suddenly have that routine stopped. That was the problem with it. That pace was unsustainable while also hooking one in so deeply. There had been, she supposed, a real withdrawal over it. This year she had better be ready with something to replace the Nanowrimo effort when it was over.
She thought that doing this challenge made her more productive in other ways too. Just the act of seeing one's almost daily accomplishment efforts pile up had a wonderful effect on one's psyche and emotional well being.
Now she was indulging in day dreaming. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, but she was all too aware of how widely her word rate could vary at any one writing session. She had not figured out what caused her writing to be so much faster at some times than at other times.
12:18p object crossing the sky with tail across the whole expanse
She ached to find out what those objects were that crossed the sky. She thought they were on the same path she had seen lights travel at night.
She was growing a bit drowsy she thought. Now she longed to lay down.
There was a sound at the door as if mail had been dropped through. It was too early for mail though. And she did not see the mailman cross the road as he usually would after leaving her house. That was not quite true. He would go across the yard to the neighbor to the North and then dom down the street. There she saw the deliverer. She thought he bore the tri-colored post office stripe across his jacket. But he came from delivering to the house across the way, something she had never seen before. And then he had crossed back to this side on a diagonal. This must be a different mail carrier if it had been the mail carrier.
It was Wednesday. What mail would she be getting on a Wednesday?
The other day she had received the good news that the children's art classes that she gave at the library, would continue to be funded, apparently for another year. Her patrons were very proud to be sponsoring the class. She was very relieved to know this.
A session like yesterday's class had been troubling and difficult though. She simply had to write up something that would clarify just what she expected from the participants. Either that or she had to find a different way to work with them all. It still shocked her to what extent children were infantalized by almost everyone around them. Were these children going to grow out of these behaviors that were being established and taking when they still had the ability, the flexibility, to quickly adapt to more useful behaviors? She was envisioning legions of children growing into adulthood with behaviors that served them poorly, served each other poorly, and were so deeply engrained that though they could be changed, they would be difficult or problematic to change.
The behaviors were allowed to continue. Not only continue, but seemed to be constantly reinforced.
12:37 pm - wow! It was time to stop.
3607 words
12:50 pm resume w. 10 alarm reset
She had not been able to resist. She felt she was so close to reaching 4K words for the session that she just had to set the alarm for a few more minutes and see if she might make that target in 10 minutes. She had done the basic administration work of setting up the document in the program that did the word count. She had entered the information in the spreadsheet. She had entered notes on the running side note she had started keeping for the writing.
None of that changed that she still did not have anything else to say, not under this kind of pressure. She really should be coming to the writing with some kind of notes on things she wanted to remember to include in her writing. She had just read a piece on some kind of online 'coach' who had recently had to do a live radio interview call. This meant that the two people did not sit face to face but just voice to voice. They probably had not even known each other. The Coach described how she had prepared herself for the experience. She had made some notes about some things she wanted to be sure to cover. They were points that came from a book she had written. Something about the whole process was that there was to be a spontanaity about it. How was one spontaneous at the same time that one was prepared? What did that ever mean to be spontaneous? One had to be so well practiced in a skill that one could do it at the drop of a hat as if it were effortless, as if it seemed to come right off the top of one's head.
1:00pm the 10 minute alarm (reset 10 minutes)
The Coach described opening the window blinds to reveal the scenery outside that she would look at while talking with the interviewer. The Wrimoer had forgotten what kind of coach this person was, what their book was about, what their topic was about. She just had the memory of a short list of salient points to cover, and the calming scene to watch while talking.
The Wrimoer wondered how she would do giving a public speech or an interview as described. She did know that though some people read their speeches, they usually read them so poorly that no matter how well written they would put her to sleep or to turning off the radio. It was not much better to have a speech memorised if one could not deliver it as if one was coming up with the thoughts for the first time. Now she remembered - this woman did something with singing and song as a way to develop one's public speaking ability, or even just for speaking up in any situation.
The Wrimoer was dawdling again, staring off into space..
1:10 pm alarm 4104 words
She had made it!
Wed. 11/20/13 9:54 am
It had been several days since the Wrimoer had done any writing for the month long writing challenge. She settled down to have a go at a writing stint and realized she had almost forgotten to implement the strategy that had been so helpful to her recently. She needed to set the timer for one half hour.
The last writing stint had been at the library working on their equipment. It had left her with such a bad taste in her mouth that she had not been able to get herself to write again until now. That could also have been because she had made so much headway before that with the new writing strategy, that she felt she could afford to take a break.
The night before she had been looking forward to getting to sit down for an uninterrupted morning of writing. She almost could not wait for it. She was finally at the keyboard and screen, with no idea what would come to her to write about. There did not need to be much when one was just writing whatever one's thoughts were, not worrying about a plot, not worrying about anything that way. She felt some twinges that she was cheating in doing the challenge in this way. But she had just wanted to keep her focus simple - to practice writing and generating thoughts, generating writing however unimportant. It seemed so silly.
Whenever any complicated thoughts came along, she wanted to put them aside to a time when she could think about them and write properly about them. She had even come up with a possible idea for how to contain this format of writing within another story - to put it in an envelope or another package. Hah - that could be done literally in the story, but that was not what she meant. She meant it figuratively. If she were to do that, it would probably be happening both figuratively and literally. Did that make any sense?
Even having to now think up how to put the writing she had already done inside of another story, was too much to figure out. She knew there was no way she could make up story madly at the constant pace of writing she was trying to maintain. She had to cast aside anything like that, any efforts beyond what just came to her ready to be written down.
She wondered how the other Wrimoers were able to keep up what seemed to be much greater writing paces than she kept up. There had been that article she had seen where the writer said it basically took him an hour to bang out the required daily quota of 1667 words. She could not imagine being able to do it that quickly. She could not imagine it so much so that she did not even really believe he could do it that quickly.
There were people who thought nothing of writing 5-7K words at a pop. Some of them had higher writing goals for the month. Others just wanted to see how quickly they could do the challenge. She'd read on the local group page, that there was at least one person reporting in a few days ago already that they had finished. That person had not been able to finish in past years, so the victory was especially sweet for them.
She was coming to a pause in her thoughts. So tired of what she had been talking about. She was looking at the clock, becoming a clock watcher.
That reminded her of the kids' drawing class she had taught the previous day. She wanted to tell about that, but it was too public an affair. She could not write about it in this context. She wished there was a way she could write about something and disguise it as something else. One could not stop to think of that though.
She just wanted to be done with this project. She felt so sure this was not a way for her to go about doing anything like this. She needed a smaller daily quota and it should not necessarily be daily. It just needed to be any pace that was regular so that it resulted in getting to see something grow.
She thought maybe that was what had been so important for her the last time - to be able to see something grow - whether it was whittling down the word count needed or watching the word count rise. That was what was satisfying she thought. She had ideas how that could be applied to a regular practice of art. Whether one made consistent little sketches and started piling them up, no matter how quick they were, or tackled something bigger, did not matter. If one tackled something bigger, one needed to be able to track it in a way that gave one positive reinforcement that kept spurring one on.
She had felt good that she was posting these writing efforts to a blog, but was not happy that it would stop when the project was over. If she did nothing further with it, she would be unhappy about it. How could she continue writing in that blog if that theme was over with?
The author Doris Lessing had died the other day. The public radio station played excerpts of past interviews with her. The Wrimoer was not much of a reader of fiction anymore, especially not literary fiction, so she did not know Lessing's work. She liked
10:27am alarm, reset
what Lessing had said, (perhaps it had been in advice to would be writers). She said if one was writing authentically, writing what was important to one, one did not have to worry about choosing themes to write about. That would just naturally take place. Themes would just become self-evident in the writer's work, because the writer was writing the things that mattered.
Now what would the Wrimoer write about? It had been a good couple sessions with her adult public art class and her private class. The private class had been just one student. They had not tackled the same subject as the public class had. The Wrimoer found it difficult to work in the context of giving a lesson. She either got concentrating on her own work and then felt she was neglecting her role as an instructor. Or, she could not help but want to converse when in such close proximity to another person. Then she felt she was infringing on the other person's ability to concentrate. She had discovered that there were a couple of working methods she was able to use under such conditions.
She was able to paint directly, while also conversing, if she just treated the subject as something to find beautiful shapes in. If she tried to make an accurate drawing to paint later, she found that was too hard for her to do in that context. It almost always frustrated her. To just paint in a manner that did not allow for much correction had its own freedom. She could relax and enjoy watching the shapes come out, watching the paint come out, watching the pigment ebb and flow in the waters of the little puddles she put on the paper. It did not matter whether she worked in beautiful jewel like colors, or worked in earthtones. She had managed a pencil sketch and two wash drawings or paintings of a little chipmunk feasting on a huge rose hip berry.
This was a photo she had taken a few years earlier. She had come across the chipmunk while out taking photographs on a property for a standing yearly commission for a Christmas card image. The subject was never Christmas. The subject was to be, if possible, a scene from the client's summer property. There was the chipmunk right in her path with his feast. She had been able to come up quite close taking photos of it all the while. She was perhaps two feet away before it finally abandonned its feast. That was the kind of thing she loved to be privy to.
The chipmunk had gotten in the painting too, though she had painted it quite small within the much larger scene. She would have preferred to be able to paint the chipmuch larger in the foreground and have the scene much more secondary.
The public class had worked with raccoon images for their warm up sketching and then chose from a variety of woodland critters - foxes, squirrels, chipmunks, and the raccoons. The Wrimoer had done a crayon drawing of a fox family. Her intention was just to make up a quickie scene by putting together a few of the reference drawings she had on hand. She had had to draw quickly so that she could be done by the end of class. It had almost come to a point where she was stuck in a drawing that
10:57 am alarm reset
.... did not quite make sense. This was again due to not being able to properly concentrate in that context. How were the students able to work under these circumstances? But then, they did have to stop to keep an eye out on how things were going for the others. There was always a dilemma about this for her.
She loved the comraderie and the fellowship that came from holding the classes. She also felt that the in having the larger public classes, she did not really have an obligation even to herself to make any art. And yet, she did feel that obligation. She felt she had to make some kind of art, not matter how simple, quick, or crude. And if only to illustrate some aspect of the lesson. The pressure came, she felt, from feeling that a year hence meant she had to have new images to show when it came time to write a press release.
This last press release announcing the November adult art program, she had not recycled images. She had only submitted one, as that was all she had done. Or was it that that was all she had ready for submission?
She was staring off into space quite a bit trying to gather thoughts, to think of them, to arrange them (was this a form of editing?). She was not typing non-stop. There was a ways to go with the last timer session before it would ring.
In the Western sky was a short streak moving steadily towards the horizon towards the Southwest having arced from the Northeast. She was quite sure she had seen such a streak quite often. She did not know how high in the sky this object was. Was this like whatever she saw crossing the sky at night? Was this a satellite or was it simply a jet way up there? She did not know what these things really looked like to be able to tell them apart. There was another following the same path. The white tail was relatively short. That was why she thought it must be very high. It did not leave a trail across the whole sky.
She thought perhaps she would check in with the Nanowrimo Write-In that was to be at the library that day at mid-day. She had missed the first two sessions. The first she had forgotten about, and she had not yet committed to the challenge. Neither did she want to commit to it. The second one she had been so busy writing at home that the Write-In was out of the question. It was coming on time to at least check in with the leader and let her know what she had been up to. The last session would be the day before Thanksgiving. That was always a difficult day to do anything of a normal routine.
Going out to Thanksgiving meant she would have to cook her two dishes that she always cooked for Thanksgiving. The last few years she had not cooked them because she had not needed to or had not even gone out for Thanksgiving. Every time she had bought the ingredients for these two dishes, the yams and the cranberries, but they had always ended up rotting away.
Last year's big accomplishment was that she had roasted a turkey for herself on Thanksgiving. She only bought it because they were so inexpensive to buy at this time. She almost was not able to buy it in time. The store had been out of them when she went shopping. She had had to return at a later date to get a turkey at that price. It was questionable whether it would defrost in time. It had not completely defrosted in time
11:27 am alarm reset
.... It had been so late in the day before she could put the bird in the oven. The package of innards had been frozen to the cavity. She had to wait until she could get that out before she could put the bird to roast.
The bird had barely made it under the midnight wire of Thanksgiving before it was cooked
11:31 am...another short tailed object following that path in the sky....
and then she had to get the bird carved up - aach - she did not remember just how it had all gone. She just remembered that it had been the tastiest bird she had tasted in many years. She was very proud of that, since it was the first time in 15 years that she was roasting a bird or any large piece of meat.
11:34a two objects crossing the sky, one short tailed, one a tail across the whole expanse as it moved in that path. What were these things? Was this the hour of many flights?
The Wrimoer was eager to look up her notes about last year's turkey cooking. She always wrote notes or accounts about the cooking of the yams and the cranberries. Now she worried over whether she had made an account of it. She presumed so. She had taken a lovely photo of it because she had been so proud of it. Whether she had written up how she did it, was another question.
The heater that had run all morning and making the apartment overheated, had shut down for a bit. It had not taken long to be able to feel the chill and the drafts behind her. The thermometer just behind where she sat writing now said 76ยช, but that did not mean one did not feel cold drafts just inches away from the thermometer. Any moving air gave the impression of coolness and made things feel colder than they actually were.
There were actually so many things to write about but none of them could be used in this context where she would post her writing efforts online.
When she went to the library the other day with the intention of writing there, she had advised herself that it would be good to go there exactly for the purposes of having something possibly come up that she could write about. A kind of going out in hopes that one would find something to write about. Journalism on a very small scale. She was not going out the way those wonderful Naturalist writers did. They trekked out into the 'wild' and wrote about the little dramas in the woods they came across. She supposed she could do that too to some extent.
The walk to the library was not a great distance. She had to busy herself staying warm. She could hardly stop to truly observe anything. Now she was remembering what it had been like to sit writing in the library using unfamiliar equipment. It was not so much that the equipment was unfamiliar, but that one knew one had limited time on it. Any time spent fussing with the equipment was time not spent using it. It put a crimp on things. There was always this conflict between not wanting to have one's use of a thing curtailed or restricted on the one hand, and on the other hand not wanting it to be so open ended. That ended up being a bottomless pit of time spent. Where and how did one draw the line, she wondered over and over again.
The alarm would soon be ringing. She had read a lovely article that morning explaining why one seemed to often wake up a few minutes before the alarm clock rang in the morning. It was that the 'brain' hated to be startled with the alarm ringing. The 'brain' hated to wake up that way. It much preferred waking up naturally. So it sent out whatever chemicals it needed to in order to wake one's self up ahead of the alarm. There was much more to the article and she was not sure she was even relating it properly.
11:56 am alarm (reset 10 min)
Now she was at the freedom point. She could just keep writing as she wished without setting the alarm, or she could set it for another stint. For the moment she had just set it for 10 minutes.
She knew she should get up and get herself ready for the day. Now she was feeling stubborn and resistant about that too. Whenever one finally got going on one thing, one just did not want to stop that activity.
She had the insight the previous day that the true purpose of 'practice', (she hoped she had not written about this here - she was pretty sure she had written about it only in her longhand journal), was to develop a habit for an activity. A habit that made one love doing the activity. Just the repetition of doing a thing could make one used to doing it and make one like doing it. As long as one started with small amounts of it and gave oneself some kind of positive association with it, an
12:07 pm alarm (30 min reset)
activity one found unpleasurable, could be made pleasurable over a bit of time. One got conditioned to it. She thought this was also a very useful strategy for getting anything done.
She wondered if that too had been part of what made her Nanowrimo involvement that first year so important for her. And she wondered if it had also not been a very depressing effect to suddenly have that routine stopped. That was the problem with it. That pace was unsustainable while also hooking one in so deeply. There had been, she supposed, a real withdrawal over it. This year she had better be ready with something to replace the Nanowrimo effort when it was over.
She thought that doing this challenge made her more productive in other ways too. Just the act of seeing one's almost daily accomplishment efforts pile up had a wonderful effect on one's psyche and emotional well being.
Now she was indulging in day dreaming. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, but she was all too aware of how widely her word rate could vary at any one writing session. She had not figured out what caused her writing to be so much faster at some times than at other times.
12:18p object crossing the sky with tail across the whole expanse
She ached to find out what those objects were that crossed the sky. She thought they were on the same path she had seen lights travel at night.
She was growing a bit drowsy she thought. Now she longed to lay down.
There was a sound at the door as if mail had been dropped through. It was too early for mail though. And she did not see the mailman cross the road as he usually would after leaving her house. That was not quite true. He would go across the yard to the neighbor to the North and then dom down the street. There she saw the deliverer. She thought he bore the tri-colored post office stripe across his jacket. But he came from delivering to the house across the way, something she had never seen before. And then he had crossed back to this side on a diagonal. This must be a different mail carrier if it had been the mail carrier.
It was Wednesday. What mail would she be getting on a Wednesday?
The other day she had received the good news that the children's art classes that she gave at the library, would continue to be funded, apparently for another year. Her patrons were very proud to be sponsoring the class. She was very relieved to know this.
A session like yesterday's class had been troubling and difficult though. She simply had to write up something that would clarify just what she expected from the participants. Either that or she had to find a different way to work with them all. It still shocked her to what extent children were infantalized by almost everyone around them. Were these children going to grow out of these behaviors that were being established and taking when they still had the ability, the flexibility, to quickly adapt to more useful behaviors? She was envisioning legions of children growing into adulthood with behaviors that served them poorly, served each other poorly, and were so deeply engrained that though they could be changed, they would be difficult or problematic to change.
The behaviors were allowed to continue. Not only continue, but seemed to be constantly reinforced.
12:37 pm - wow! It was time to stop.
3607 words
12:50 pm resume w. 10 alarm reset
She had not been able to resist. She felt she was so close to reaching 4K words for the session that she just had to set the alarm for a few more minutes and see if she might make that target in 10 minutes. She had done the basic administration work of setting up the document in the program that did the word count. She had entered the information in the spreadsheet. She had entered notes on the running side note she had started keeping for the writing.
None of that changed that she still did not have anything else to say, not under this kind of pressure. She really should be coming to the writing with some kind of notes on things she wanted to remember to include in her writing. She had just read a piece on some kind of online 'coach' who had recently had to do a live radio interview call. This meant that the two people did not sit face to face but just voice to voice. They probably had not even known each other. The Coach described how she had prepared herself for the experience. She had made some notes about some things she wanted to be sure to cover. They were points that came from a book she had written. Something about the whole process was that there was to be a spontanaity about it. How was one spontaneous at the same time that one was prepared? What did that ever mean to be spontaneous? One had to be so well practiced in a skill that one could do it at the drop of a hat as if it were effortless, as if it seemed to come right off the top of one's head.
1:00pm the 10 minute alarm (reset 10 minutes)
The Coach described opening the window blinds to reveal the scenery outside that she would look at while talking with the interviewer. The Wrimoer had forgotten what kind of coach this person was, what their book was about, what their topic was about. She just had the memory of a short list of salient points to cover, and the calming scene to watch while talking.
The Wrimoer wondered how she would do giving a public speech or an interview as described. She did know that though some people read their speeches, they usually read them so poorly that no matter how well written they would put her to sleep or to turning off the radio. It was not much better to have a speech memorised if one could not deliver it as if one was coming up with the thoughts for the first time. Now she remembered - this woman did something with singing and song as a way to develop one's public speaking ability, or even just for speaking up in any situation.
The Wrimoer was dawdling again, staring off into space..
1:10 pm alarm 4104 words
She had made it!
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Sun. 11/17/13 3:09 pm
at the library...
The Wrimoer had decided it was warm enough that she should go out for a walk before doing the day's writing session, and that the walk could incorporate doing at least some of the writing at the library. She would again be using their equipment.
She got the equipment set up and then saw that the battery could be getting low. This meant having to set up in another spot so that she could plug the equipment into a power supply. All this ate into writing time.
The last time working at the library there had been other problems that would take too long to sort out. She had instead made do with what she knew, so that she could just go ahead with the writing. That had meant having to do the writing online rather than offline. That also meant having to stop to save it frequently, or to email it frequently just as an insurance. One never knew when connections would break and wipe everything away.
Here she was again feeling as if she had nothing much she wanted to say. The equipment was dizzying because of the ergonomics of it. She could feel that almost as soon as she sat down. It also kept wanting to complete words for her. That got in the way of seeing what she was typing. She could try just staring into space as she typed. But even that was weird on her vision.
The gas fireplace was roaring. That affected the air pressure in the room, and that affected the equilibrium for her. Being outside had been good for her equilibrium. That was something she could not understand. Why was the air outside so much easier on inner ear equilibrium?
The Wrimoer thought she might write about the further developments with the incident the previous week where she had called the police because of what she perceived as a possibly dangerous situation. But now that it was time to write, and she had had an exchange with the neighbor that helped clarify the situation for both, or so she hoped, she did not want to have to deal with going through the whole story. Not in these strange writing conditions.
What noises were going on around her in the library. People were coughing deeply and sniffling mightily. One person was actually lying on the little sofa with their reading. This was the deep Cougher. The Wrimoer remembered that she had heard this person coughing that deeply before. And it had been many months before. The Sniffler was coughing too. And she was sitting quite close to the Sniffler because of needing the power supply for the equipment.
When she had checked in on the downstairs neighbor, that person had said that they had the flu so they would keep a distance from her. It seemed many people were coming down with all manner of illnesses.
That the Wrimoer had not had a cold or flu in several years, she found to be a testament to her contention, her belief, that the other symptoms she had been having the past several years relating to this equilibrium issue, ….
The Wrimoer had just gone through a panic situation with the equipment. She was trying to change the text size and had hit some button that made everything disappear. That was perhaps the first thing one needed to learn – how to undo unwanted changes. She had tried using 'undo' but it was not doing what she wanted it to do.
She called a staff member to help her. They had then called another. And luckily the material was retrieved. Not that the material was of any consequence.
It was definitely becoming a problem to sit looking at this kind of screen with the lighting in the library. She did not know what kind of lighting was hidden behind those huge overhead half globes hanging from the ceiling. She assumed they were some kind of fluorescent lighting. That light vibrated a lot and promoted visual disturbance that affected one's equilibrium.
She decided she would finish up and head home. Hopefully she would be able to get more writing done there. This had been unproductive other than having gotten a bit of a walk in. The next day was to be a rainy and stormy day she had learned at the library. She hoped she could make an arrangement for a student to give her a ride to class.
c. 3:45p? 755 words
at the library...
The Wrimoer had decided it was warm enough that she should go out for a walk before doing the day's writing session, and that the walk could incorporate doing at least some of the writing at the library. She would again be using their equipment.
She got the equipment set up and then saw that the battery could be getting low. This meant having to set up in another spot so that she could plug the equipment into a power supply. All this ate into writing time.
The last time working at the library there had been other problems that would take too long to sort out. She had instead made do with what she knew, so that she could just go ahead with the writing. That had meant having to do the writing online rather than offline. That also meant having to stop to save it frequently, or to email it frequently just as an insurance. One never knew when connections would break and wipe everything away.
Here she was again feeling as if she had nothing much she wanted to say. The equipment was dizzying because of the ergonomics of it. She could feel that almost as soon as she sat down. It also kept wanting to complete words for her. That got in the way of seeing what she was typing. She could try just staring into space as she typed. But even that was weird on her vision.
The gas fireplace was roaring. That affected the air pressure in the room, and that affected the equilibrium for her. Being outside had been good for her equilibrium. That was something she could not understand. Why was the air outside so much easier on inner ear equilibrium?
The Wrimoer thought she might write about the further developments with the incident the previous week where she had called the police because of what she perceived as a possibly dangerous situation. But now that it was time to write, and she had had an exchange with the neighbor that helped clarify the situation for both, or so she hoped, she did not want to have to deal with going through the whole story. Not in these strange writing conditions.
What noises were going on around her in the library. People were coughing deeply and sniffling mightily. One person was actually lying on the little sofa with their reading. This was the deep Cougher. The Wrimoer remembered that she had heard this person coughing that deeply before. And it had been many months before. The Sniffler was coughing too. And she was sitting quite close to the Sniffler because of needing the power supply for the equipment.
When she had checked in on the downstairs neighbor, that person had said that they had the flu so they would keep a distance from her. It seemed many people were coming down with all manner of illnesses.
That the Wrimoer had not had a cold or flu in several years, she found to be a testament to her contention, her belief, that the other symptoms she had been having the past several years relating to this equilibrium issue, ….
The Wrimoer had just gone through a panic situation with the equipment. She was trying to change the text size and had hit some button that made everything disappear. That was perhaps the first thing one needed to learn – how to undo unwanted changes. She had tried using 'undo' but it was not doing what she wanted it to do.
She called a staff member to help her. They had then called another. And luckily the material was retrieved. Not that the material was of any consequence.
It was definitely becoming a problem to sit looking at this kind of screen with the lighting in the library. She did not know what kind of lighting was hidden behind those huge overhead half globes hanging from the ceiling. She assumed they were some kind of fluorescent lighting. That light vibrated a lot and promoted visual disturbance that affected one's equilibrium.
She decided she would finish up and head home. Hopefully she would be able to get more writing done there. This had been unproductive other than having gotten a bit of a walk in. The next day was to be a rainy and stormy day she had learned at the library. She hoped she could make an arrangement for a student to give her a ride to class.
c. 3:45p? 755 words
Saturday, November 16, 2013
"This was just like planting a seed and watering it. "
11/16/13 Sat 9:30 am
The Wrimoer felt as though she were getting an earlier start on her writing this morning. She thought she was actually starting later, but then realized that was not true. She had thought she was earlier because she had managed to do a few other things than usually before settling down to the writing. When she looked through her previous days' notes she realized she was getting an earllier start in several ways. It did not just feel like she was getting an earlier start. She really was getting an earlier start. She had even completed her full cycle of walking 2000 steps.
The walking in the house for exercise had fallen by the wayside a bit as a routine recently as she had gotten walking done just by having to get to the library on foot, or get to the bank on foot. Today she might have to walk somewhere, but she had also gotten the indoor walking done. The Wrimoer felt good about that.
She wondered was this one of the after effects that came from doing this daily writing for the Nanowrimo project? She suspected it was so. There had been effects like this the first time she had done it. That was one of the reasons it had been such a let down when she had finished the project. She had never been able to think up a replacement for the project that had the same qualities about it.
It had to be done on a daily basis, or as close to it as possible. There had to be a goal or something specific one had to reach for during each session. It had to be doable on a near daily basis. It was not something that could be put off too long because it was just not physically possible to catch up. One knew that so well from experience that the motivation to keep up was intrinsic, was internalized.
So why could one not just make up a challenge for oneself and do it? Was it that one had to make the challenge one set for one's self public? She was not convinced about this.
She suspected the whole issue was also connected with writing. She had not wanted to continue with writing about following the diarist/journal writer with no name, not even a noun description given to her. The writing that time had gone too far without a name or a noun put to use to designate the writer - it had been too long without that the Wrimoer had had to continue that way. When the challenge had been completed, she did not know what format to continue writing in.
As with this time, the Wrimoer had been posting each session to a blog she had set up just for the project. She was not willing to just continue by writing in her own voice. Perhaps that was what made the whole project a unique experience for her. She had decided that this time she would have to replace this practice somehow. She did not know how, but she knew it was very important for her to find something to replace it. She could keep posting to a blog or the same blog. Her idea this day had been to set up a new blog and provide links to the two Nanowrimo efforts blogs. That way they would not be completely lost, in limbo land.
She knew she would have to bite the bullet one of these days and share the blog somehow. Just how she wanted to do that was yet unknown.
The timer for her first writing section had been set. She felt that it was already early on for feeling she had nothing more to say, She hoped she would be able to maintain this manner of writing in the possible 15 days that were left for completing the challenge. The day before had been the halfway mark. She had accomplished the word quota for the halfway mark. There was still plenty of writing that needed to be done. It felt different to know that what needed to be spat out was now less than the amount that had already been spat out. She had illusions of thinking she could sit there and keep up the writing pace for double the quota
10:00 am alarm
amount and be finished with the challenge very early. What wishful thinking that was. There were all those other Wrimoers who were way ahead in their word count. She thought she had seen some of them say that they were doing this because they knew there would be days later on in which they would not be able to write. But at least one person had set a much higher goal to complete for the challenge.
The Wrimoer's favorite story was of one Wrimoer who wrote in saying they were quite far behind and fearing there was no hope of getting caught up. Others had seen that the person could catch up. The knew from their own experience that it was possible to write the amount needed. Everyone gave encouragement,. Within just a few days, that Wrimoer had gotten caught up. That was uplifting to read.
The other story was of concern because that person was in almost dire circumstance. One could only sit from the distance and know this person was out there in their dire circumstance, that could well have been of their own making, but that did not matter. One still worried about the person. One also knew that it was that person's private mission/battle/challenge to deal with. Here was a story that took place in real life. Some people just had to have their lives be the story. Was there anything really wrong with that? That was just as much a creative act as the stories taking place on the writing spaces. This person had even mentioned that they were at least writing their story in their head.
The Wrimoer's mother had told her how she was writing her stories in her head? She spoke of questioning whether to use this word or that word. The wrimoer had been amazed to hear this. She could not imagine being able to write in this way - to carry it on in her head and remember it by the wording to the point of being able to edit the wording. She could not imagine being able to do this without actually seeing it.
It was that way with her art too. She never really pictured what she was going to draw or paint, or even what she wanted to. She did not have that kind of vision, she thought. Or perhaps she just had never practiced it. It was a form of committing something to memory. Perhaps she did these things but did not realize she was doing them.
10:15 am
She had taken to writing down the time every time she hit an impasse where she felt she had run out of anything to write. She would feel edgy, look at the time, perhaps sigh about it, and then for want of anything else to write, would write down the time. Then she could write a little about that and hopefully something else would pop into her mind that she could write about.
There had been something she had heard in the news that morning that she had wanted to write about. Now it escaped her - there she thought it came back.
It was a story about a couple where the wife was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. The news program had been following them for three years, and were visiting them for this piece to see how they had been coping. The Wrimoer had been intrigued with the story because of the difference between the attituds of the two people. They themselves spoke of that attitude difference. They were very aware of it. The Wrimoer suspected that that attitude difference could well mean all the difference in the world, but she doubted that anyone was yet studying this aspect. The wife, or rather the couple, were involved in an Alzheimer's outreach program. This program was something to get information out to others, to help them. The wife seemed to be very active and proactive in it. And she knew she was. She spoke of her attitude being that one could not let this 'problem' stop them from living as normal a life as possible. She said specifically that she chose to remain positive about it. That that was a difference between herself and her husband. The husband on the other hand spoke of having to stay realistic about , that there was no cure, and that someone had to be realistic about it. It pained him greatly to watch how some of the others in the group were losing their abilities. One fellow in the group had tried to speak up about the things he wanted the group to do. One heard him in the radio piece as he simply could not find the words to express his thought. It was so much like what the Wrimoer had heard in programs or movies about stutterers. She wondered if it was not more about being suddenly on the spot and that one just froze up not being able to say anything. It had more to do with the tension and panic of the situation than that one could not remember. And if one paid it too much mind, one could easily get stuck there. One had to talk around it, move on. Whatever it
10:30 am alarm
... was would return on its own terms. This was the nature of memory and creativity.
Her own biggest example of this was the experience many years ago in Girl Scouts. It must have been at the beginning of a school year session. For some reason they had all had to stand in a circle and introduce themselves. Or they were sitting in a circle and had to stand up to introduce themselves. She did not remember whether or not it had crossed her mind "What if I could not remember my name when it is my turn?!", but that had been what had happened. It came her turn and suddenly her mind blanked or she started to blurt out the name of the person who had just said their name. It had been a silly and funny occurrence. Yes, she had been able to remember her name after a moment. She had laughed about it. But ever since then, she was reluctant to have to introduce anyone else to anybody because she felt she would draw a blank when the person to be introduced was waiting for their name to be said. These were usually people she knew very well, which would make the situation all that much more awkward. Her way around it was to just tell people to introduce themselves. It was tricky to do this without bringing the focus back on oneself over why one could not provide the introduction oneself.
On the other hand with her art classes, the Wrimoer loved showing off her remembering of names. The groups were generally so good humored over having to be put through these performances. But this was also where and how she practiced this skill. It was a skill to practice. It needed to be reinforced by reviewing the attendance sheets or by the emails one sent out to the groups whereby one was seeing their names as one entered the addresses into the message.
Some names stuck out more than others. She never knew if it was the actual name or the individual that prompted easy memory.
The couple in the radio piece served as a great positive example with the battle of Alzheimers. The Wrimoer saw that the wife, the diagnosed one, was someone who took charge of her life. She was not about to be a victim. She was intent on working with others and saw things in terms of how much she still could do. She saw what needed doing and felt she could do something towards that effort. In this case her particular mission was that word needed to be gotten out to the African American community. Apparently this demographic was having a higher incidence of Alzheimers. The wife felt they were underserved in the battle against it, or in what could be done to ease the living with it. That was what the wife was focusing on. It struck the Wrimoer, that this woman could well outlive her husband. She had heard how negative he was.
The Wrimoer had been suspecting all along that there were effects on one's life, on any situation, in taking a 'victim' stance instead of protaganist stance, being someone who was in charge. One need not be in charge of others, but one needed to be in charge of one's self and one's life. She had only to look around her and see the faces and the postures of people that expressed how little they felt in charge of themselves. They seemed to believe the stories that others gave them without questioning whether they were true or not. It seemed that so few people accepted their own authority in any given situation.
10:55 am
The Wrimoer hoped she would get to hear more about this couple over time. It sounded to her like this woman was off to a good start. It had been three years since she had been diagnosed, and she did not sound like she was doing badly at all.
There were a few other inspirational aging stories she had loved over the years, not all on the radio. Here where she lived there was the example of the patriarch of the family where she would be going for Thanksgiving. He was now over 100 years old. She thought her was about to have his 102 birthday
11:00 alarm
A couple years ago she had popped in to visit him to ask him if he could participate in certain celebration. She thought she had better pop in rather than calling him. He was busy doing some heavy yard work - trimming the hedge with a big heavy power hedge trimmer. He had teased her and told her she could do some of the work for him. He had always been a tease, a serious leg puller. His granddaughter had advised her that she not let him give her an answer to her request right off the bat because once he said 'No' it meant No. That was that, one never got another chance. She had messed up on that and had asked her question right away. He had said no right away. Since he had told her she could only have one half hour to visit with him, that her ride should return for her then, they went in the house to chat.
They had jumped around all sorts of topics, so much so that she had never gotten to make an account of all the things he had told her. One of the things that so interested her was that he had long ago given up doing things like addressing groups or being interviewed for the local news. He told her he had become a 'recluse'. That was not that true.
He made rounds in which he visited people.
11:09 a bluejay is calling -
11:12 a - resume
she thought. Whether they were people who were in the hospital, or people from his church community who were going through a housebound spell, she was not sure of. Had they even discussed that? She just remembered he had done that in the past. She had heard that about him.
He told of his main routines or rituals. He did a certain walk every day no matter what the weather. This was also to a certain spot where he had had a kind of healing or spiritual experience many many years ago. He also spent time in study on a daily basis - a reading and contemplation period. In the summer he had three large yards or fields to keep mowed. He always had a lot of work that he did. He did not stop. Neither did it concern him that some day the end would come. She believed he had never handed his own authority over to any other person or institution.
The Wrimoer wished there were more examples like him around. They did not need to be that age to be fine examples of people aging in all their full forces. She could not accept seeing people shrivelling up taking on the role of 'getting old' and therefore one was to old to change, one was too old to learn, one could not help things, one had to accept that these were the things that happened to one as one aged. She did not believe that. She felt that things happened to people for other reasons, but not because they were aging. She knew it was possible to get stronger no matter how old one was. She thought the problems were more a result of a loss of spirit or zest. One could call it a kind of depression. What did life have in store for one if one believed it was all downhill from here? One needed to always have challenges to pit one's self against. Not to 'get stronger' but to test and grow one's boundaries - to expand one's boundaries. That was just the real nature of things she believed.
Now she knew the timer would be ringing in a moment. She was reluctant to look for anything else to write on with that little time left. As she wrote her last few words she hoped she would not get another thought that would set her off and running again. The she would have to set the timer again.
A few minutes before she had had to break away because the bluejay had come hollering at the window. They had not done that for quite awhile now. She made an exception and broke her
11:30a (ok 10 min. alarm)
writing session for just a few minutes to go give the hollering bluejay some peanuts. She wanted to give him the message that if he called he would get a response. She grabbed a handful of peanuts and the dish of leftover dry cat food that she was throwing out to the birds daily. The bluejay seemed to see her from his position in the fir tree outside. He was a young scrawny one. She nodded to him and showed the dish with food on it. She went to the window from which she always threw the food. A sibling joined him out there, and then three crows. She greeted them and then tossed out the food. And returned immediately to her writing, though she returned with a few peanuts for herself to eat.
And now there was nothing left to say. She had set the timer for another 10 minutes. At least she did not do it for another half hour. What happened to wanting to get this writing all out of the way and over with? That would mean piling extra time on every writing session. Would not this be an obvious occasion for writing extra? Here she had had such a head start.
She was balking though. She also knew that if she did the writing too much on one day, she felt oversaturated with the effort the next day. If there had been too much on one
11:40 am alarm
... day, one needed distance from it the next day. It could be that much harder to get started on it the next day. One had to watch that one was not forcing a thing upon one's self. The challenge or the effort had to stay in a spirit of fun. She needed to remember always, that this was not something she had to do. She was doing it for her own pleasure. her own fulflillment.
She had gone through periods after her day's writing where she felt as if her time had been spent in a wasted way. She had almost felt depressed over having spent time doing the writing. She had not even decided yet whether or not she was enjoying it. Aaahh - that was part of what Hemingway's advice had been. One was not to concern one's self with whether one enjoyed a thing or not. One was to observe a circumstance, to observe one's own reactions and motivations that came up. To study them in effect. This was all part of learning. To see what gave rise to what. It was especially important in writing. He did not even seem to think it was that important that one be writing what one was observing. To him it was just as important to simply be studying what was actually going on. Or so she thought. That was what she was remembering.
It had occurred to the Wrimoer that that Wrimoer with the dire circumstances could be material for a story itself. Had she said this already? She knew that Wrimoer could write her story, but was she going to? Here was something she herself could write. She had thought that she could at least write up some ideas for it, and some questions.
How that Wrimoer landed in the circumstances of first living in a tent, and then living in a van at her mother's house, along with her boyfriend.
How had that Wrimoer broken her hand, which made it too hard for her to write by hand?
How had she come to have a bad foot by which it was too hard to walk to the library which was far away? Had she said she had broken her foot or just that she had a bad foot?
She had managed to get to the library at least to exchange piles of books for new reading materials. How did she get to the library at those times?
Did she just have a very short time at the library so that no writing could really take place there?
She only had a few minutes a day in which to use her mother's phone and check in with social media.
The Wrimoer wondered what she would or could do in the same circumstances. All along she had wanted to brainstorm a bunch of ideas of what one could do to mitigate the circumstances. It seemed that Wrimoer had written or created herself into a corner. She thought it was important to perform some creative act no matter how small on a daily basis. It should also be something that one could see grow over time. It would not take that long to start to see the effort grow.
This was just like planting a seed and watering it. As one tended that little seed and waited for it to push through the ground one did so without knowing when it would show its face. One had to wait until it did it on its own time. But one had to keep watering it while also making sure not to give it too much water. One could not stand watching it all day. One just checked it daily to see that the conditions were ok. Usually one had planted several seeds, not just one. In every batch of seeds, only some would come through. That was just the way of things. And then came the day when the green started to show. Every day it was a bit more. And so it went. From the little seedlings came strong stalks and leaves, and finally buds that turned to flowers and in many cases also fruits and vegetables.
12:10 pm timer rings - now she would stop for the day. She had finished her thoughts this time instead of being in the middle of an idea when the timer rang
12:11 pm
4034 words ??!! 160 minutes @ 25 wpm Wow!
11/16/13 Sat 9:30 am
The Wrimoer felt as though she were getting an earlier start on her writing this morning. She thought she was actually starting later, but then realized that was not true. She had thought she was earlier because she had managed to do a few other things than usually before settling down to the writing. When she looked through her previous days' notes she realized she was getting an earllier start in several ways. It did not just feel like she was getting an earlier start. She really was getting an earlier start. She had even completed her full cycle of walking 2000 steps.
The walking in the house for exercise had fallen by the wayside a bit as a routine recently as she had gotten walking done just by having to get to the library on foot, or get to the bank on foot. Today she might have to walk somewhere, but she had also gotten the indoor walking done. The Wrimoer felt good about that.
She wondered was this one of the after effects that came from doing this daily writing for the Nanowrimo project? She suspected it was so. There had been effects like this the first time she had done it. That was one of the reasons it had been such a let down when she had finished the project. She had never been able to think up a replacement for the project that had the same qualities about it.
It had to be done on a daily basis, or as close to it as possible. There had to be a goal or something specific one had to reach for during each session. It had to be doable on a near daily basis. It was not something that could be put off too long because it was just not physically possible to catch up. One knew that so well from experience that the motivation to keep up was intrinsic, was internalized.
So why could one not just make up a challenge for oneself and do it? Was it that one had to make the challenge one set for one's self public? She was not convinced about this.
She suspected the whole issue was also connected with writing. She had not wanted to continue with writing about following the diarist/journal writer with no name, not even a noun description given to her. The writing that time had gone too far without a name or a noun put to use to designate the writer - it had been too long without that the Wrimoer had had to continue that way. When the challenge had been completed, she did not know what format to continue writing in.
As with this time, the Wrimoer had been posting each session to a blog she had set up just for the project. She was not willing to just continue by writing in her own voice. Perhaps that was what made the whole project a unique experience for her. She had decided that this time she would have to replace this practice somehow. She did not know how, but she knew it was very important for her to find something to replace it. She could keep posting to a blog or the same blog. Her idea this day had been to set up a new blog and provide links to the two Nanowrimo efforts blogs. That way they would not be completely lost, in limbo land.
She knew she would have to bite the bullet one of these days and share the blog somehow. Just how she wanted to do that was yet unknown.
The timer for her first writing section had been set. She felt that it was already early on for feeling she had nothing more to say, She hoped she would be able to maintain this manner of writing in the possible 15 days that were left for completing the challenge. The day before had been the halfway mark. She had accomplished the word quota for the halfway mark. There was still plenty of writing that needed to be done. It felt different to know that what needed to be spat out was now less than the amount that had already been spat out. She had illusions of thinking she could sit there and keep up the writing pace for double the quota
10:00 am alarm
amount and be finished with the challenge very early. What wishful thinking that was. There were all those other Wrimoers who were way ahead in their word count. She thought she had seen some of them say that they were doing this because they knew there would be days later on in which they would not be able to write. But at least one person had set a much higher goal to complete for the challenge.
The Wrimoer's favorite story was of one Wrimoer who wrote in saying they were quite far behind and fearing there was no hope of getting caught up. Others had seen that the person could catch up. The knew from their own experience that it was possible to write the amount needed. Everyone gave encouragement,. Within just a few days, that Wrimoer had gotten caught up. That was uplifting to read.
The other story was of concern because that person was in almost dire circumstance. One could only sit from the distance and know this person was out there in their dire circumstance, that could well have been of their own making, but that did not matter. One still worried about the person. One also knew that it was that person's private mission/battle/challenge to deal with. Here was a story that took place in real life. Some people just had to have their lives be the story. Was there anything really wrong with that? That was just as much a creative act as the stories taking place on the writing spaces. This person had even mentioned that they were at least writing their story in their head.
The Wrimoer's mother had told her how she was writing her stories in her head? She spoke of questioning whether to use this word or that word. The wrimoer had been amazed to hear this. She could not imagine being able to write in this way - to carry it on in her head and remember it by the wording to the point of being able to edit the wording. She could not imagine being able to do this without actually seeing it.
It was that way with her art too. She never really pictured what she was going to draw or paint, or even what she wanted to. She did not have that kind of vision, she thought. Or perhaps she just had never practiced it. It was a form of committing something to memory. Perhaps she did these things but did not realize she was doing them.
10:15 am
She had taken to writing down the time every time she hit an impasse where she felt she had run out of anything to write. She would feel edgy, look at the time, perhaps sigh about it, and then for want of anything else to write, would write down the time. Then she could write a little about that and hopefully something else would pop into her mind that she could write about.
There had been something she had heard in the news that morning that she had wanted to write about. Now it escaped her - there she thought it came back.
It was a story about a couple where the wife was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. The news program had been following them for three years, and were visiting them for this piece to see how they had been coping. The Wrimoer had been intrigued with the story because of the difference between the attituds of the two people. They themselves spoke of that attitude difference. They were very aware of it. The Wrimoer suspected that that attitude difference could well mean all the difference in the world, but she doubted that anyone was yet studying this aspect. The wife, or rather the couple, were involved in an Alzheimer's outreach program. This program was something to get information out to others, to help them. The wife seemed to be very active and proactive in it. And she knew she was. She spoke of her attitude being that one could not let this 'problem' stop them from living as normal a life as possible. She said specifically that she chose to remain positive about it. That that was a difference between herself and her husband. The husband on the other hand spoke of having to stay realistic about , that there was no cure, and that someone had to be realistic about it. It pained him greatly to watch how some of the others in the group were losing their abilities. One fellow in the group had tried to speak up about the things he wanted the group to do. One heard him in the radio piece as he simply could not find the words to express his thought. It was so much like what the Wrimoer had heard in programs or movies about stutterers. She wondered if it was not more about being suddenly on the spot and that one just froze up not being able to say anything. It had more to do with the tension and panic of the situation than that one could not remember. And if one paid it too much mind, one could easily get stuck there. One had to talk around it, move on. Whatever it
10:30 am alarm
... was would return on its own terms. This was the nature of memory and creativity.
Her own biggest example of this was the experience many years ago in Girl Scouts. It must have been at the beginning of a school year session. For some reason they had all had to stand in a circle and introduce themselves. Or they were sitting in a circle and had to stand up to introduce themselves. She did not remember whether or not it had crossed her mind "What if I could not remember my name when it is my turn?!", but that had been what had happened. It came her turn and suddenly her mind blanked or she started to blurt out the name of the person who had just said their name. It had been a silly and funny occurrence. Yes, she had been able to remember her name after a moment. She had laughed about it. But ever since then, she was reluctant to have to introduce anyone else to anybody because she felt she would draw a blank when the person to be introduced was waiting for their name to be said. These were usually people she knew very well, which would make the situation all that much more awkward. Her way around it was to just tell people to introduce themselves. It was tricky to do this without bringing the focus back on oneself over why one could not provide the introduction oneself.
On the other hand with her art classes, the Wrimoer loved showing off her remembering of names. The groups were generally so good humored over having to be put through these performances. But this was also where and how she practiced this skill. It was a skill to practice. It needed to be reinforced by reviewing the attendance sheets or by the emails one sent out to the groups whereby one was seeing their names as one entered the addresses into the message.
Some names stuck out more than others. She never knew if it was the actual name or the individual that prompted easy memory.
The couple in the radio piece served as a great positive example with the battle of Alzheimers. The Wrimoer saw that the wife, the diagnosed one, was someone who took charge of her life. She was not about to be a victim. She was intent on working with others and saw things in terms of how much she still could do. She saw what needed doing and felt she could do something towards that effort. In this case her particular mission was that word needed to be gotten out to the African American community. Apparently this demographic was having a higher incidence of Alzheimers. The wife felt they were underserved in the battle against it, or in what could be done to ease the living with it. That was what the wife was focusing on. It struck the Wrimoer, that this woman could well outlive her husband. She had heard how negative he was.
The Wrimoer had been suspecting all along that there were effects on one's life, on any situation, in taking a 'victim' stance instead of protaganist stance, being someone who was in charge. One need not be in charge of others, but one needed to be in charge of one's self and one's life. She had only to look around her and see the faces and the postures of people that expressed how little they felt in charge of themselves. They seemed to believe the stories that others gave them without questioning whether they were true or not. It seemed that so few people accepted their own authority in any given situation.
10:55 am
The Wrimoer hoped she would get to hear more about this couple over time. It sounded to her like this woman was off to a good start. It had been three years since she had been diagnosed, and she did not sound like she was doing badly at all.
There were a few other inspirational aging stories she had loved over the years, not all on the radio. Here where she lived there was the example of the patriarch of the family where she would be going for Thanksgiving. He was now over 100 years old. She thought her was about to have his 102 birthday
11:00 alarm
A couple years ago she had popped in to visit him to ask him if he could participate in certain celebration. She thought she had better pop in rather than calling him. He was busy doing some heavy yard work - trimming the hedge with a big heavy power hedge trimmer. He had teased her and told her she could do some of the work for him. He had always been a tease, a serious leg puller. His granddaughter had advised her that she not let him give her an answer to her request right off the bat because once he said 'No' it meant No. That was that, one never got another chance. She had messed up on that and had asked her question right away. He had said no right away. Since he had told her she could only have one half hour to visit with him, that her ride should return for her then, they went in the house to chat.
They had jumped around all sorts of topics, so much so that she had never gotten to make an account of all the things he had told her. One of the things that so interested her was that he had long ago given up doing things like addressing groups or being interviewed for the local news. He told her he had become a 'recluse'. That was not that true.
He made rounds in which he visited people.
11:09 a bluejay is calling -
11:12 a - resume
she thought. Whether they were people who were in the hospital, or people from his church community who were going through a housebound spell, she was not sure of. Had they even discussed that? She just remembered he had done that in the past. She had heard that about him.
He told of his main routines or rituals. He did a certain walk every day no matter what the weather. This was also to a certain spot where he had had a kind of healing or spiritual experience many many years ago. He also spent time in study on a daily basis - a reading and contemplation period. In the summer he had three large yards or fields to keep mowed. He always had a lot of work that he did. He did not stop. Neither did it concern him that some day the end would come. She believed he had never handed his own authority over to any other person or institution.
The Wrimoer wished there were more examples like him around. They did not need to be that age to be fine examples of people aging in all their full forces. She could not accept seeing people shrivelling up taking on the role of 'getting old' and therefore one was to old to change, one was too old to learn, one could not help things, one had to accept that these were the things that happened to one as one aged. She did not believe that. She felt that things happened to people for other reasons, but not because they were aging. She knew it was possible to get stronger no matter how old one was. She thought the problems were more a result of a loss of spirit or zest. One could call it a kind of depression. What did life have in store for one if one believed it was all downhill from here? One needed to always have challenges to pit one's self against. Not to 'get stronger' but to test and grow one's boundaries - to expand one's boundaries. That was just the real nature of things she believed.
Now she knew the timer would be ringing in a moment. She was reluctant to look for anything else to write on with that little time left. As she wrote her last few words she hoped she would not get another thought that would set her off and running again. The she would have to set the timer again.
A few minutes before she had had to break away because the bluejay had come hollering at the window. They had not done that for quite awhile now. She made an exception and broke her
11:30a (ok 10 min. alarm)
writing session for just a few minutes to go give the hollering bluejay some peanuts. She wanted to give him the message that if he called he would get a response. She grabbed a handful of peanuts and the dish of leftover dry cat food that she was throwing out to the birds daily. The bluejay seemed to see her from his position in the fir tree outside. He was a young scrawny one. She nodded to him and showed the dish with food on it. She went to the window from which she always threw the food. A sibling joined him out there, and then three crows. She greeted them and then tossed out the food. And returned immediately to her writing, though she returned with a few peanuts for herself to eat.
And now there was nothing left to say. She had set the timer for another 10 minutes. At least she did not do it for another half hour. What happened to wanting to get this writing all out of the way and over with? That would mean piling extra time on every writing session. Would not this be an obvious occasion for writing extra? Here she had had such a head start.
She was balking though. She also knew that if she did the writing too much on one day, she felt oversaturated with the effort the next day. If there had been too much on one
11:40 am alarm
... day, one needed distance from it the next day. It could be that much harder to get started on it the next day. One had to watch that one was not forcing a thing upon one's self. The challenge or the effort had to stay in a spirit of fun. She needed to remember always, that this was not something she had to do. She was doing it for her own pleasure. her own fulflillment.
She had gone through periods after her day's writing where she felt as if her time had been spent in a wasted way. She had almost felt depressed over having spent time doing the writing. She had not even decided yet whether or not she was enjoying it. Aaahh - that was part of what Hemingway's advice had been. One was not to concern one's self with whether one enjoyed a thing or not. One was to observe a circumstance, to observe one's own reactions and motivations that came up. To study them in effect. This was all part of learning. To see what gave rise to what. It was especially important in writing. He did not even seem to think it was that important that one be writing what one was observing. To him it was just as important to simply be studying what was actually going on. Or so she thought. That was what she was remembering.
It had occurred to the Wrimoer that that Wrimoer with the dire circumstances could be material for a story itself. Had she said this already? She knew that Wrimoer could write her story, but was she going to? Here was something she herself could write. She had thought that she could at least write up some ideas for it, and some questions.
How that Wrimoer landed in the circumstances of first living in a tent, and then living in a van at her mother's house, along with her boyfriend.
How had that Wrimoer broken her hand, which made it too hard for her to write by hand?
How had she come to have a bad foot by which it was too hard to walk to the library which was far away? Had she said she had broken her foot or just that she had a bad foot?
She had managed to get to the library at least to exchange piles of books for new reading materials. How did she get to the library at those times?
Did she just have a very short time at the library so that no writing could really take place there?
She only had a few minutes a day in which to use her mother's phone and check in with social media.
The Wrimoer wondered what she would or could do in the same circumstances. All along she had wanted to brainstorm a bunch of ideas of what one could do to mitigate the circumstances. It seemed that Wrimoer had written or created herself into a corner. She thought it was important to perform some creative act no matter how small on a daily basis. It should also be something that one could see grow over time. It would not take that long to start to see the effort grow.
This was just like planting a seed and watering it. As one tended that little seed and waited for it to push through the ground one did so without knowing when it would show its face. One had to wait until it did it on its own time. But one had to keep watering it while also making sure not to give it too much water. One could not stand watching it all day. One just checked it daily to see that the conditions were ok. Usually one had planted several seeds, not just one. In every batch of seeds, only some would come through. That was just the way of things. And then came the day when the green started to show. Every day it was a bit more. And so it went. From the little seedlings came strong stalks and leaves, and finally buds that turned to flowers and in many cases also fruits and vegetables.
12:10 pm timer rings - now she would stop for the day. She had finished her thoughts this time instead of being in the middle of an idea when the timer rang
12:11 pm
4034 words ??!! 160 minutes @ 25 wpm Wow!
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