September 11, 2011

The tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks is naturally producing a lot of commentary.  I think that's good.  While my general rule on this blog has been to avoid commenting on politics, I'm going to relax that today.  It's not that I think what I have to say is especially important, but it is what it is, and I'd like to share it.

People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy.  We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information.  Then things happen, and people get old and die.  I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II.  Things that only he remembered are gone now.  So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.

I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it.  It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language.  But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them.  I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.

I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated.  I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have.  3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number.  As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands.  I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them.  In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died.  But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not.  It affected me.

Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school.  I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other.  My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.

And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion.  It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later.  But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.

September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack.  Not until the end, anyway.  First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.

We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office.  She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.

I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room.  Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city.  This made sense at the time.

I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit.  The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it.  In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center.  No other details.  I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic.  But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize.  No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.

I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew.  At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.

At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked.  I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now.  At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.

Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day.  I respect the decision now (I might even have then).  Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.

But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid.  Bombs were being dropped.  Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking.  I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.

I realized then that this was a very important day.  I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins."  Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.

The rest of the day is a blur until the end.  At some point I got set straight about the bombing.  In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers.  I had $20.  I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting.  He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself.  I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.

Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.

I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home.  Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.

The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000.  In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.

I was mad.  I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me.  It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart.  You do not f*ck with us.  I wanted to do something.  I wanted to fight someone.  Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.

I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day.  It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were.  Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice.  He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood.  Looking back, it was a scary time.  There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.

The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened.  There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said.  I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims."  I think hearing that was good for us.

One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war.  His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would.  And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.

For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.

Geeks & Gatherings

It's late for a timely retrospective on PAX 2011, so I'll spare you.  It was cool that the convention annexed the Paramount Theater this year, and very convenient, especially compared to Benaroya Hall last year.  Otherwise, it was a PAX, and as such a great deal can be left unsaid.

I won't be the first person to notice an emerging "geek" counterculture.  It's certainly on display at PAX.  What I've noticed recently about people addressing large numbers of geeks is that a great deal of their humor consists of references to shared media experiences from the 80s and 90s.  "Humor" might not be the right term.  Anyway it seems odd to me.  I mean, I don't imagine mainstream public speakers being cheered when they display an awareness of American Idol, or whatever.  Or maybe they do.  I'll confess to not knowing from first or secondhand experience.

If my writing seems even more off-the-cuff than usual tonight, it might be because I am also talking to Girlfriend in another tab, and chatting with Cleverbot in another.  The latter encourages a breezy, somewhat whimsical style.

Anyway, regarding geeks, I have a theory.  If geeks (as we currently use the word) have anything in common it is an affinity for obscure pursuits.  And all of them (us?) (the relatively well-adjusted ones, anyway) have at one time or another been very happy to discover another person who shares their interests.  If certain PAX speakers are to be believed, it can be an epiphanic experience, and one of profound self-validation.  At any rate, my theory is that that is what geeks are largely trying to recreate.

I suppose that having an odd hobby isn't that different than being different in other ways.  Obviously, realizing you like Magic: The Gathering isn't as hard on a thirteen-year-old as realizing you're gay, say.  But I imagine the ritual of mass self-identification is common to subcultures that have been oppressed, to greater or lesser degrees.  Geeks just use media as their totems.

And in three paragraphs (and one digression) I have reduced my theory to a fairly banal observation.  Oh well.

I'm trying things out, seeing what I can keep up, before I sign a version of my personal contract, which I talked about last post.  The good news for you (assuming you are a regular) is that one of the terms of the contract is that I post here at least once a week.  But maybe I'll have more to say next time.

Oh, Bryan is in a thing on the internet.  I suppose it will appeal primarily to fans of JourneyQuest.  If you are not a fan of JourneyQuest, you should go become one, then come back and click that link.

The dotted line

A Sunday can feel really long when you wake up before 9.  That that is an observation I can make is probably a sign that I should go to church more often.

I have completely moved out of my old room, and into Girlfriend's (former, bigger) room.  Because my mess has now turned inside-out, my new room is more crowded than my old room ever was.  Even so, I imagine I will sort it out eventually, mostly.  Maybe I should make a rule of some sort, such as: whenever I have to look for something, I clean up what I had to look through?  Do I have time for that?

A few things have come together recently to get me thinking about personal contracts.  One, most recently, was an article about "decision fatigue" claiming that studies are indicating that the ability to decide to do stuff is a finite resource, like the ability to lift heavy things or stay awake.  It's certainly tempting to think that I, myself, am particularly susceptible to this, inasmuch as I keep finding myself lacking the mental energy to change what I'm doing.  It's intensely frustrating that writing, while exciting, is an expenditure of mental energy.  But maybe this is a bit of self indulgence.  Ultimately, whether we call them character flaws or find new, fancier terms for them, these are things we need to get around or else not be the people we want to be.

Stumbling on The Freelancer's Survival Guide, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was another thing.  For a few days this past week, reading that book free on her blog was my preferred form of procrastination.  I'm not qualified to assess her advice (although she sounds authoritative, and I'd like to be able to recommend this book), and I'm still digesting what I've read, but it got me into the mindset of imagining myself writing for a living, and what kind of lifestyle it would take to actually make that work.

She also included a lot of cautionary tales about contracts which, along with my regular work, got me thinking about precise language and how to write good and bad contracts.  Not that that is my area of expertise competence.

Then there's the likelihood of moving, and the possibility that I will do so without a job like the one I have.  Let's be honest--I'm imagining myself moving after Girlfriend even without a job on the other side, even if I shouldn't be thinking like that at all.  But if I were to write full-time, or even part-time, I'd need to get to a point where 1,000 words isn't very good for a Monday.

One thing Rusch asked is what gets you out of bed and to work in the morning?  I'm not sure I'm answering the question in the spirit in which it was asked, but I thought about it: routine, expectations, inertia.  It got me thinking that if I wrote myself a job description, perhaps I could hold myself to it.  Could I import what's helpful in my real job to a self-employment situation?  Those helpful things, as I see it, are: a commitment to work (not just be present) for a fixed amount of time, and a clear hierarchy of priorities.  I don't spend much energy deciding what projects to work on, because that's hardly negotiable.  I don't spend any energy deciding to go to work (and extremely rarely have the energy to decide not to go to work).  These are the things I started working out language to describe, in hopes of setting up a useful status quo.

I might have drawn something up that day when I got home, if it didn't start to sound very self-indulgent of me, and like a distraction from actual writing I could do.  So I didn't, and surprisingly enough, I don't think I got too much of anything else done instead.  So the idea came back.

Maybe today is the day after all.  More to the point, perhaps, maybe I was thinking about this wrong.  I don't have to define my responsibilities when I don't have a job.  (In fact, I should probably set the terms of what to do if I am unemployed while I am employed, and still remember what a workday feels like.)  I could--and maybe need to--define my responsibilities concerning my free time.

When I started writing this post, I didn't think I would do that today, but at this point I'm considering it.  When I stopped writing "Nenle and Death" for now, I thought I was done writing, but maybe I was just done with that.  By the same token, I didn't expect to have the energy to write anything after this post, but now it doesn't sound so hard.  Also, there's a lot of day left.

2,160 miles at the equator

Where to start?  I'm not in the best of moods these past few days, and since I haven't been posting about things of major personal significance, I might have to start at the beginning, wherever that is.

Of secondary importance is this: the cold which I complained of in my last post is still here, though finally being subdued.  A visit to the doctor last Monday and subsequent blood work revealed that this is, in fact, no mere cold, but the dreaded mononucleosis.  I had gone to the doctor hoping to discover I had strep throat, as I have had many times in the past, and which can be killed with antibiotics.  But there is nothing to do about mono except treat the sore throat (which is finally going away) and stick it out.  Also, to my chagrin, I need to take still more time off from jujutsu, lest I risk rupturing my spleen.  So I am told.  It is a small risk of a big problem.  But at any rate the mono itself has provided an interesting undertone to what's actually been going on.

What's actually been going on is that Girlfriend, who I love, has moved to Washington D.C. to pursue a teaching position.  This happened relatively suddenly; the offer came about a month ago, and while we had both understood that she would move if that sort of opportunity came up, it still left only a month to actually get used to the idea.  Really, I didn't get used to the idea, either--that's what I'm doing now.  So as of Friday evening, my girlfriend and I are separated by a distance roughly equal to the diameter of the moon.

This is probably the beginning of the end of my time in Seattle.  It is probably the homestretch before that future period that I have been thinking of as actual adulthood.  At 26, I might be overdue.

The past few days have not been productive.  I figured I'd give myself a couple of those.  But now it's time to get things together, at least on some axes.  Over the next few days I want to produce a final draft of another short story, tentatively titled "Nenle and Death," which should come in 50 to 100% longer than "Burned at the Stake."  This story has actually been percolating as long as four years--I wrote the earliest draft on a plane in what I believe was 2007.

It's about loss and separation.  I'll put that out there to preempt psychoanalysis when people actually see the story.  So, no, it's not really a coincidence that I'm deciding to finish it now (in preference of a shorter story I am at a similar stage with, about dragonslaying).

A mystery is solved

Oh dear, I didn't mean to let more than a week pass since my cryptic post without elaboration.  This post was really due last Friday, but Friday evening saw me leaving The Grid the whole weekend, and then, werk, werk, werk, and also, Girlfriend like it's going out of style, because even though she will never go out of style, she is going out of state.

But anyway, answers.  Some of you have heard of Machine of Death.  Actually, all of you have heard of Machine of Death, if "heard" includes "read" and you read this post.  Or, if you hunger for true knowledge, go hear about Machine of Death.  The point is this: some cool people made the coolest short story collection I have ever seen, and then decided to make a sequel.  And I wanted in.

This was several months ago, when submissions for Machine of Death 2 were first solicited.  I had an idea, threw it out, had another, tried to write it, hit a dead end, threw it out, gave up, had another idea, tried to write it, threw it out, and gave up again, pretty for real this time.  And then, the weekend before the submission deadline, my first idea ripened.  Or perhaps it sprouted.  This story may have been a potato: it both ripened and sprouted while I left it in a dark corner of my brain and forgot about it.  And when the tendrils began to creep up between the floorboards, I got very excited.

But there was no time.  Alas!  Except, Girlfriend, pointed out, there was time: five days.  I just had to buckle down NaNoWriMo style.  She suggested that I skip jujutsu on Monday to stay home and right.  "You're under deadline," she said.

That was a heady phrase.  Real writers have deadlines.  What's more, I realized that when the other guys at the gym asked where I had been, if I told them I had been under deadline, they would believe me.  I had never even considered the possibility of people thinking I was a writer.  Not any time soon.  My friends, of course, know I write... but they also know me well enough to know how far I was from being published.

Suddenly five days from the end, with a cold, I put basically everything on hold, like I never had for NaNoWriMo.  My recreational activity for that week consisted of watching the first 20 minutes of Casino Royale, and I really felt like I was getting away with something there.  I gave up the news, which is saying something.

Writing a short story in a week is an interesting experience.  The rush that comes from the end approaching comes before the rush that comes from the beginning has worn off.  It's something I could get used to, if I could get used to sleeping six hours a night and taking two weeks to get over a cold.

The end result is a short story I'm actually rather pleased with, called "Burned at the Stake."  It is the first short story I have, perhaps ever, submitted for publication.  It is definitely the first I have ever completed to what I would now think of as submission quality.

What are my odds of being published in Machine of Death 2?  There were more than 1,200 submissions, possibly significantly more.  I think my odds are better than 1/1,200.  I should know by November.  If they don't decide to use it, I'll post it here.  How does that sound?

A mysterious update

Today I wrote 1,876 words, including these.  When I'm done I'll tell you what it was for.

The last man on earth sits at his computer. There is a comment on his blog...

A pitfall of not posting regularly which I am discovering is a glut of subjects which deserved their own posts, and which are destined to be glossed over or forgotten when I actually get to them.  Things keep happening, go figure.

I just deleted a few sentences about the most important thing going on in my life.  If you know me then you already know what it is, probably.  If you're one of my readers, at any rate, at this point you're either one of my closest friends or an Eastern-European robot.  (I long for the day when the majority of my readership consists of sentient human beings.)

I'm almost certainly not long for Seattle, although it's hard to know exactly how long "not long" is.  I've already stayed here years longer than I imagined I would, long enough to get a "real" job and make actual money.  Not what people generally refer to as "real money," mind you.  It's still joke money, but enough to weigh someone down in the elaborate practical joke that is the present US economy.

<Danger: Politics imminent.  Initiating automatic course correction.>

<Recalculating...>

<Recalculating...>

I went to see X-Men: First Class yesterday, and that was fun.  I am glad that that sort of movie is still being made: movies that are smart without being "smart movies" (defined here as movies that producers think only three people are going to see in theaters, like The King's Speech).

Usually when I take in any kind of media with other people my first reaction is to pick it apart and analyze everything that I didn't like about it.  Even with things that are mostly good, this is usually the conversational direction that interests me the most.  That said it speaks well of First Class that I didn't have a whole lot to say about it on the way out, except that it was good.  The same can be said for the production of Sweeney Todd that I caught a couple weeks ago at Lakewood Playhouse.  Later things begin to settle, and I can analyze what I actually like.  First Class is a pretty structurally sound movie, even though it sometimes (particularly at the beginning) has the conglomerate feel of a biopic.  It was capable of subtlety.  I was impressed looking back on a character moment that covertly educates the audience about things that will be important later.

...As I have put this post aside and just come back to it now, I'd like to wish a happy Independence Day to my human readers.

I'm about 3/5 through Dracula, which I last attempted with little success around 10th grade.  Looking back, I don't fault myself for losing interest.  Oh, it's interesting, but I had better things to be reading at the time.

There are good things about that book, but I think it will be more fun to talk about the things I don't like.  See above.

I suspect some people will disagree with me, but I cannot abide Abraham Van Helsing.  I am tempted to say that everything I find irksome about Dracula is united in the person of that insufferable Dutchman.  Bram Stoker, for instance, thinks accents are funny.  Witness the hijinks that ensue when Jonathan Harker interacts with the British working class.  But the various manual laborers Harker inebriates at least have a good excuse for withholding information (they are, to a man, too thirsty to remember properly) and are upfront enough when this is remedied.  Van Helsing talks a lot more, and says a lot less, and plumbs new depths of painful exposition by delivering his infodumps in fractured grammar.  Clearly it is meant to be funny, but the timing is generally rather bad and hilarity is limited.  At any rate I find no pleasure in the linguistic bloodsport that is a paragraph of Van Helsing's lecturing.

There is one thing that Bram Stoker does that I have begun to notice in films and the like.  Having never seen it pointed out, I will call this "technique" inexposition.

Bram Stoker is neither the inventor, nor the chief user, of inexposition.  It makes up a good deal of the dialogue in the first season of Heroes.  It is how, in Iron Man, Tony Stark's arc reactor goes from keeping shrapnel away from his heart to actually running his heart.  It is, as simply as I can put it right now, the attempt to convince the audience of something by having a character state it casually, so as to hide the actually substantial logical leap behind it.

Inexposition can be very useful in moving a story along.  While explaining an unlikely state of affairs could take pages or minutes of exposition, it takes no time at all to simply state a premise and hope that audience members will just assume they missed something and plow ahead.  Hopefully wherever you go from there will be interesting enough that they will let it go.  Better to ask forgiveness than seek permission and all that.

I'll tell you what, I think this post is plenty long right now, so goodnight fellow humans, and once again, happy Independence Day.  And to my other readers, when your Independence Day comes, remember that I was a friend.