Writer's Journal

When I moved into my campus apartment in August, there were a number of problems with it—burners on the stove didn’t work properly, the fan in the bathroom didn’t work, and the storm window in my bedroom lacked a lower pane. They said that it would be handled soon.

So, I went to class. I wrote. Two more things broke in mid-September:the towel-rack in my bathroom and one of the banks of fluorescent burnt out. I contacted the apartment manager, and waited.

The fluorescent lights got fixed, and my stove came to life.

But it was getting colder, and it turns out that a great deal of insulation is provided by storm windows.

At some point, last year—either late October, or early November—I came down with a fever of 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Living in the mountains in late fall, with howling winds that can rip right through your coat, the last thing you need is a fever.

Calling the housing office got my sympathetic sounds, no progress on the repair, and an angry housing manager, who assumed I was trying to directly place a work order.

With a combination of whiskey, and tea, I managed to beat the fever, despite the fact that it sounded like a legion of the damned were shrieking outside my window. No repairs.

I tried going in and talking to them, but they were out to lunch, as everyone you need to talk to between 11 AM and 2 PM are.

Most of December and part of January were spent in Kansas City, but the window was waiting for me when I returned. Everything else faded into the background, leaving just that rectangular gap in my wall before my consciousness.

So, two weeks ago, my computer looked like it wasn’t starting up, preventing me from getting at my files for class. Needless to say, I panicked.

After a course of events in which the window didn’t get fixed, and an angry note (which denied that my storm window was broken) from my apartment manager appeared on my floor, my window was not fixed.

Around this time, I began to get angry. I realize that seven months living in what is essentially a meat locker seems like it would do that, already.

Here’s the thing, though: Grad School distracts you from everything.

In all honesty, I noticed the low temperature in three cases: when it caused me health problems, when it prevented me from doing my work, and when my power bill showed up.

So, Monday, I went to the housing office, and insisted that something be done about it. It took a while, but they checked the work order and reposted it.

I’m glad, because just about everything in my apartment’s been fixed, except the bathroom fan, and that just means that I need to scrub my bathroom again.

But what they said to me afterward had to be one of the most irritating things anyone has ever said:

“You really should have told us sooner.”

Last Friday, I dropped my car keys and thought I’d lost them. Realizing that something was wrong, I went looking: I eventually found them sitting on the damp asphalt by the trunk of my car and stuck them in my pocket.

Then I went about my day, typing things out, checking and double-checking research. I did my laundry, returning to work at my computer between loading and unloading the washer and drier.

But every now and then my car alarm went off. Knowing the small remote on my keychain doesn’t work properly, I assumed it must be an electrical problem. Those aren’t uncommon–the car is, in fact, eleven years old. The power locks don’t work, though thankfully the windows still do.

Needless to say, this made me feel a little upset. After all, I had just had quite a bit of work done on it not a month ago. Numerous things had gone wrong, and I ended up needing to make two trips just to make sure everything was working properly.

So every time the alarm went off, I took off my house shoes, unlaced and laced by boots, and pulled on my coat, cursing under my breath.

But without fail, every time I stepped out the front door of my apartment, the honking would stop, and I can only assume that the flashing lights did as well. No one paid it any mind, but it was horribly irritating.

The third time that this happened, I had had enough, and resolved to go down and inspect the vehicle even if it did stop. I slapped down my pockets, looking for my keys, and discovered them in my back pocket.

I had been sitting on the “panic” button the whole time, and, having parked on the opposite side of the building from my front door, every time I went out my front door, the combination of concrete walls and distance had signaled the car to stop honking.

Going to my back window, I raised up the keys and hit the “lock” button. The lights flashed. Apparently, instead of shorting out the remote, it had caused the unworking mechanism to short back into functionality.

Honestly, I didn’t know that could happen.

I work in a campus writing center, helping people with their academic writing.

This has done two things to me:  It has made me more conscious of sentence structure, and it has made me into an asshole.

While some people might argue that the latter isn’t exactly a new thing, what I mean to say is that an entirely new crop of problematic behaviors have come out in dealing with people who don’t understand my purpose there.

“Can you edit this for me?  I’ll be back in an hour or two to pick it up,” is not something I’m there to help people with.  I’ve been asked that on several occasions and I’ve said no on just as many.

On others, the following exchange happened:

“Do you have your assignment sheet?”

“Assignment sheet?”

“You know.  The sheet that tells you what your assignment is.”

“Uh…no…”

And I try to help them as best I can.  Some people I know how to help:

“You need a comma here,” I tell her.
“That’s not quite how you spell that,” I inform him.
“I’d suggest moving this paragraph…here.”
“Are you sure this is entirely accurate?”

On other occasions, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing:
“Go to file, and hit ‘open.’  No.  ‘Open.’  Here, let me do it.”
“Could you tell me what this word is?”
“I don’t mean to offend…but is english your first language?”

That last one is a minefield, especially with the immigration debate.  A large number of students here legitimately don’t speak English as a first language, which is why I ask.  I have yet to ask someone that it wasn’t true of, but I dread the possibility that I might.
I can usually tell those who are working in a second language from those who aren’t.  The latter tend to ignore me while I’m speaking to them and send text messages, at which point I tend to stop caring.

“Yeah, you’re fine,” I tell them, after counting up the usage errors and trying to make my way through the unintentionally labyrinthine idea-space presented by their essay.

The non-natives present a different issue, though:  most of the at-home editing techniques I prescribe for them don’t work, and I have to find everything and give them a concise explanation.

“English doesn’t make any sense, actually,” I end up having to admit.  It’s not enitrely true, but it’s only intuitive if you’ve been speaking it long enough.
It’s not unrewarding; it’s a good enough job.  But I’m not sure I’m cut out for teaching.

As I approached the massive building, I swung my car around in a tight turn, and planted myself perfectly between two SUVs, stopping just even with their tail-lights.

I hopped out of the car, my brain screaming for nicotine, and ran toward the automatic door.

Walking past the $1 DVD rental kiosk and the machines that distribute high-fructose corn syrup, I entered the Wal*Mart.

My greatest shame is that I’ve become the sort of person who shops at Wal*Mart.  After my experience with the local grocery store, I haven’t really had a choice (the apples had been brown, and the beef had left a metallic taste in my mouth even after I’d thoroughly cooked it.)

But I wasn’t coming here for food.

Walking in, I passed the greeter, who looked at me disinterestedly, and hung a left around the carts and headed for the check-out aisle that sold tobacco products.

It was 10 PM, and the banks of halogen-bright lights were turned on full-blast.  I watched as the old man (Who looked like some unholy cross between Allen Ginsberg and Charles Manson) went through.  The family behind me did their best to convince their daughter that they didn’t need to buy any “candy.”

There was no candy in that aisle; only lighters and playing cards.  The kid would have been disappointed biting into a butane-filled tube of plastic, anyway.

Getting up to the cashier, I spoke:

“Box of Top, please.”

She went over to the shelves of cigarettes, and examined them critically, before looking back at me.

I pointed at the yellow box, down near the bottom.

She smiled, uncomprehending, before looking back at the exact spot I pointed.

“Regular,” I said, “not menthol.”

She pointed at the cannister, the option that would give me cigarrettes for a month but cost forty bucks.

“This?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “the box.  It’s two slots over.”

She picked out the cannister, and held it up.

“This?” she asked.

I shook my head, again.

“The box.”

After a brief exchange of this sort, I finally got my cigarettes, and remembered what my cover artist had told me about people who go to Wal*Mart late at night, implying that she felt a bit like Jane Goodall when she went.  I don’t think it applies in this town, as it’s the only real option.

Doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

“Have a nice night,” the greeter said, not looking up from his gameboy.

“You, too,” I said.

(I don’t like spiders; I hate them, in fact.  But the gut reaction we have to them is interesting: That revulsion that wells up out of the lizard brain and causes our limbs to do things that we don’t consciously choose.  I’ve been thinking a lot about that feeling, lately, and trying to tap into it.  So, here’s a story about spiders.)

I spent a lot of time on the porch swing of my old house, smoking cigarettes and engaging in a war of attrition with the spiders that had colonized the sagging brick-and-concrete structure.

They’d climb up and spin webs on the swing, and I’d blow cigarette smoke at them, watching as they grow drunken and spin strange, abstract webs in a nicotine-induced stupor.  After a few days, they’d disappear, only to be replaced inside of a week with another one.  Maybe a bit bigger, maybe a bit smaller, maybe colored a little different.

I hated spiders, but I wasn’t going to do anything but blow smoke on them.

Well, almost.

One night, the spider champion climbed up on my porch.  This giant bastard with knuckles on his legs and a mean look to it.  Surprised, I jumped up, shouting profanity as it got closer–being barefoot didn’t make me feel safer around it–I just imagined that it would find my exposed flesh all that much more enticing, after all, there was no chitin to protect it.

So I grabbed the snow shovel that leaned against the house, and tried to pick it up, so I could fling it out into the yard, where it could subsist on flies and squirrels, or whatever giant spiders ate.  It skittered away, and I chased after it; when I finally picked it up, it came towards me, up the handle of the shovel.

I dropped it with a thunderous clang.

My drinking buddy, who had come along with a deuce of some cheap beer he’d gotten from Zap’s, the convenience store two blocks away that had to close due to fire damage a day after they started selling barbecue, picked up a can of lighter fluid.

He attempted the same tactic I’d tried on smaller spiders, attempting to surround it with noxious fumes in the hope of driving it away.  This didn’t work.

My roommate came out to investigate the commotion, and discovered that we were smoking, drinking, and spraying lighter fluid on what could only be a wild tarrantula.

He took the logical next step, retrieved the pointer lighter and made an end of things.

Of course, having seen the movie “Arachnophobia” I figured this was a terrible move, and jumped up on the wall of the porch, away from the burning death-spider.

It sat there and died.  When it burned out, I picked it up with the shovel and threw it out in the yard, feeling bad for having panicked and having a hand in killing it.

(This is what happened last week.  I’m going to go figure out some actual fiction for Wednesday.)

I sat in the hotel restaurant–a room smaller than my living room, but well-decorated–and read the menu. My mother sat across from me, fiddling with her phone.

“You get anything you want. Don’t worry about the cost,” she said to me.

“We have a lentil soup, tonight,” the waiter said to an overweight young woman, behind me and to the right, “…I don’t really like lentils, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

I looked down at the menu, my eyes swiveling across the type.

“Do you know how to turn on my phone?” my mother asked.

I took it from her, and turned on the wi-fi with some difficulty, before handing it back to her.

“There you go,” I said.

“It’s really very good,” the waiter said.

“I’m feeling kind of sick,” my mother said.

“Try some club soda,” I said, “it’ll help.”

“Get anything you want. Don’t worry about the cost.”

I looked back down at the menu.

“What exactly are capers?” I asked, frowning at the menu.

“They’re like a berry. Want to look it up?”

I took the phone from her, and showed her how to access wikipedia.

“A berry pickled in salt,” I read.

“Lentils are very healthy,” the waiter said again.

The waitress came by our table.

“Get you anything to drink.

“A club soda,” my mother said.

“Water, please,” I said.

She frowned at me.

“You sure you don’t want a beer? He wants a beer.”

“Water, please,” I said.

“Do you want bread or chips and salsa?”

“Bread,” my mother said.

The waitress nodded,and walked away. After a moment, she returned with our drinks.

“I’m sorry, but we’re out of bread. Would you like chips and salsa?”

“No, thank you,” my mother said, sipping the club soda.

“Do you know what you’d like?” the waitress asked.

“I’ll have the chicken piccata,” I said.

“You sure you don’t want the steak?” my mother asked, referring to the night’s special.

“I’m sure. Just the chicken,” I said.

“I know this is going to sound weird,” my mother began, “but I’ve been feeling sick, could I get some lentil soup and a baked potato?”

“Of course,” the waitress said.

“I threw up today,” my mother added.

“I’m sorry,” the waitress said, sympathetic. She walked away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the waiter walk away from the two young women at the table.

“I don’t know what made me sick,” my mother declared.

“Think it was something you ate?” I asked, not really wanting to say it, considering that we’d eaten breakfast in the hotel restaurant.

“No…probably just the plane-ride.”

I nodded.

“Neither of us are very good with flying,” I said, not sure what else to add.

“No,” she responded.

She went back to experimenting with her phone, and I returned to people-watching. I didn’t want to be caught staring, so I looked down at the table, and relied on peripheral vision.

A shadow here, a laugh there.

“She’s too young for him,” my mother said, looking out the window.

“Could be his daughter,” I said, not seeing who or what she was looking at.

“Could be,” she mumbled, “are you sure you didn’t want a beer?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She returned to her phone, and we sat in tableau until the food was brought out.

“The broth feels good,” my mother said, sipping her soup, “I’m afraid that if I eat anything more…”

“Ah,” I responded, and began to eat my dinner.

After a moment, I spoke, again:

“You should try to eat some lentils. They’re healthy.”

She nodded, but turned to the potato, cutting it open and picking at it with her fork.

Hey, folks.  Normally, on thursdays, I post an amusing video.  Not this week; I’ve been doing a lot of essay writing and news-watching (mostly to do with the stuff going on over in Iran.)  It might seem odd to put a news story in a writers’ journal–even an open one like this–but a great many stories are inspired by the news, and the weird things that happen in our strange, strange world.

So, today, instead of moving pictures, I present you with a handful of static ones:

Twitter to Flickr

This is a collection of photographs taken in Iran that have been collected into a flickr account and put out there for use by News Organizations.  I thought you folks might like to see these photos and take a look at them yourselves, without the interpretation that always comes with them being used in the media.

This sort of thing is what Twitter, Flickr, etc. were meant to be for (not really, but it’s the best use for it.)  Citizen journalism at the speed of the wire:  right now, there’s a cyberwar going on in Iran, as the government tries to restrict the free flow of information.

I was going to post a link to the paranoid linux project (based on Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother) but it seems the project’s died on the vine.  Too bad, really.  There’s a wealth of relevant information on this sort of thing out there already:

• Instructables by W1n5t0n
• News story about Pirate Party & Anonymous assisting Iranian Protestors
  

But why do I find this interesting, you wonder?  There are a variety of reasons, and I’m not going into them all.  However, as a writer, I find this interesting because of the interplay of fiction and reality.  Go and look at the Little Brother link up higher on the page, realize that we’re coming into a cyberpunk future:  even if the government isn’t getting involved, people all over the world are.

Fascinating, no?

Alright, this is just some stuff swept up off the workshop floor and assembled together into a decipherable form.

To make sure we’re on the same page, are you familiar with the concept of a “smart mob”?  For those who aren’t, the nutshell definition:  A smart mob is a distributed group that organizes through technological means–peer-to-peer sharing, irc, skype, twitter, text message, and good old phone calls.  They’re a great deal like the critical mass phenomenon, in that they’re largely self-organizing (though there may be “Dispatchers” who moderate and mediate communication.)  For an example in fiction, look to Global Frequency by Warren Ellis.

Earlier today, while I was at work (slow day) I had an idea:  why not use a smart mob system to generate art?  Set up a distributed, city-wide group made up of writers, grafitti artists, editors, actors, etc. and use it to create art in a guerilla capacity, little more than an hour or a day from conception to completion.   Each endeavor could be spearheaded by the individual that came up with it, and could span a variety of media.

The idea could be especially useful for culture jamming, as well as for the generation of novel ways of approaching various media (for example, using grafitti to create sets for guerilla theatre or films.)  Of course, you’re free to take it or leave it.

Something new.

A while back, I was at Writers’ Group with some friends, and the play “Endgame” came up.  None of us recalled who had written it, even though several of us had read it for classes in college.  One of our members (Mr. McCoy, who will be managing a site containing KC-based literary podcasts soon) produced his phone and searched for the information.  He got the answer “Samuel Beckett” which was correct.

This anecdote illustrates something interesting:  In the era of orality and literacy, “knowledge” contained facts, heuristics, and several other, similar things.  This is not so, anymore.  In an era of ubiquitous computing and wireless communication, we have had a drastic reordering of priorities.

Thus, I would posit that “knowledge” is no longer fact-centric, but heuristic-centric.  For those of you unfamiliar, “heuristics” refers to problem-solving strategies, including the old standby of the trial-and-error as well as other, more complex methods.

I say this, because it is possible to look through the internet, drawing out facts and figures, from just about anywhere.  Thus, the intimate knowledge of these facts and figures is no longer essential: we will recall them, but even if we didn’t, we could repeat the search and access the same (or more accurate) data.  Therefore, I say that modern knowledge is heuristic-centric because it is now more necessary to know how to acquire the information, than the information itself.

Though some might object to this way of looking at things, saying that the abandonment of fact for strategy would be a step backward, I would point out that Plato put a similar argument into the mouth of Socrates concerning the written word:

“At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

This is an old allegory, but it illustrates that people area always resistant to these revolutionary things that Marshal McLuhan might have called “extensions of human knowledge.”  The advent of ubiquitous computing, while perhaps not absolutely revolutionary (certainly the same strategies and arguments were applicable with the invention of the printing press, though possibly not with the same urgency) was something of a Black Swan, an unforseen but game-changing event.