"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

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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.
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