everyone has infinite value

a piece of bread
with the potential energy
of 100 calories
has the value of a few cents

your mind
has the potential energy
of infinite ideas
of infinite words
of infinite power
of infinite value

why do you allow others
to treat you as less than infinite
why do you allow yourself
to treat you as less than infinite

I see your infinite value
it blinds me
this world of billions
of supernova

how different the world looks
when you see everyone’s value
like stars in daytime
as no one is worthless

do not let anyone give you
nothing for you
you are worth infinite value
you are worth living

you say, “how can we be
worth infinite value
we are common
like sand”

I say, “water is infinite value
in a desert
your mind has infinite value
in this universe”

you say, “what of the ones
who treat me as less
than infinite
what of them”

I say, “why believe them
they believe you are worthless
believe my infinity
as I believe in yours”

...

Four Ways to Edit like a Chef

Last time I used the equation:

Thought + Write + Edit =
Ingredients + Cook + Garnish

Since I’m backasswards, I want to talk about editing first.  We have the most control over the last part of the creative process, which is why we fuck it up.  We let our insecurities, frustrations, and expectations get involved, and then throw everything away.

You have a disassembled word cake that just came out of the oven.  Now what?  Here are the pitfalls to editing, and strategies on how to avoid them, all by thinking like a chef:



1) Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen.  Cooking is not a democracy.  There is a definite hierarchy.  Someone is in charge, and anyone who gets in the way is kicked out (sometimes nicely, sometimes not).

In your brain, who’s in charge of your word kitchen?  How many parts of your personality are offering “advice” and telling you how to stir your macaroni and cheese?  Do you let the images of your family and friends and teachers and critics into your kitchen?  Are they hovering over your stove?

If so, politely tell them to get the fuck out of your writing and go wait in the dining room.  Especially your critic needs to get out of the kitchen, and wait until you are done cooking.

I know this doesn’t make any sense, and goes contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about writing, but your critic doesn’t edit.  You edit.  Your critic waits until you are done, then eats your words, then writes a review.  They might send the dish back because it’s cold or needs salt or whatever, but never let your critic into your writing space.

Be your own word dictator.



2)  Leave the Drama in Your Writing.  You are not a five-star restaurant.  You don’t eat on gold plates.  You aren’t bedecked in diamonds.  When a chef cooks a steak, they know it’s just a steak.  

So why do writers act all high and mighty about what they do?  Your words are just words.  Do you freak out about making a sandwich?  No you don’t, so don’t freak out about writing a sentence.  Don’t act like writing is life and death.  Put the melodrama in the story, not in the process of writing the story.



3)  Presentation is Everything.  Here’s an ugly truth: everyone judges books by their cover.  What?  No way!  That’s not fair.  Yup, it isn’t fair, and life is not fair.

If you wrap a sandwich in paper, people will pay less for it than if a dude in a suit brings it on fine china to their table.  That’s life.  Hardback books cost triple what a paperback costs.

So when you edit, think about how you present your words.  It should match the intended audience.  For example, I can be edgy and swear on a tumblr blog, but in a college paper or a job, I would clean up my language.

Accentuate befittingly.  If you bake a chocolate cake, you might not want to decorate it with mushrooms.  Make sure the language you’ve chosen highlights your core idea (or most likely ideas). 

When I write haiku, I format them like haiku, and I frame them with hashtags so everyone knows it’s a haiku.  In a larger philosophical sense, art is anything in a frame, and as an artist, you need to make a conscious decision about your frame.





4)  Know When to Let Go of the Plate.  Imagine that a cook takes forever to bring your food, then as they’re about to drop the plate on your table they stick their finger in your mashed potatoes and say, “Oops, sorry, need to add more salt.  Be right back.”

You would leave that restaurant and never come back.

When you edit, your goal is to finish, then move on.  As I tell my kids, “Stop farting around.”  Fix your writing, and send it to the table.   Chefs are never like, “Oh no, I’ll never bake a cookie like that one again!” 

Here’s your zen moment: you can only grab something new if you’ve let something else go.   So let your old writing go.  Then you can write something new.


…


Happy writing!

Good Writing is Good Cooking

oftemm: I just love your poetry. I read it and wonder, “How do you even come up with these kind of things you write about?” I’d ask for an answer but I’d rather be kept in curiousity. :)
Don’t you stop your writing!

Thank you!  I’m glad you enjoy my work.  I want to answer your question, even though you begged me not to.  :)

…

Good Writing is Good Cooking

Think + Write + Edit = Ingredients + Cook + Garnish 

1) Think/Ingredients.  Words are concrete thoughts, so it makes sense to begin with how to think.  The best writing begins with the best thoughts.  No one wants a piece of cake made with month-old eggs and moldy flour.

So spend time thinking.  Exercise your thinking.  Stretch your brain as far in the past as it can go, then imagine being very tiny, then imagine being massive.  Imagine love.  Remember an enemy.  Remember what someone said.  Combine thoughts.  Mix them around, and see what batter forms.  Then when you have a thought that feels roughly like it could exist in reality, stick it in the oven.


2) Write/Cook.  Writing is an oven.  It’s cramped.  It’s hellish.  It seems like it takes forever.

It’s also something you have to do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.  Anyone who does anything excellent either had luck or had work.  You can’t control the former, but you can definitely influence the latter.

I’m a quantity over quality type of person.  You think every day, so write down what you think every day.  No good chef is like, “Sorry, I have the ingredients, but I’m not going to cook today.  I’m waiting until I figure out the Next Great Recipe.”  Get in the word kitchen and write.  Don’t set out to write lobster and caviar words: write cookies and ice cream and salad and french fries.  Write what sustains you.


3)  Edit/Garnish.  This is the place where a lot of people get stuck.  If you only have the first two steps, then all you have is writing, the majority of which is garbage.  Most of your word muffins are burnt or lumpy or gooey or dry or clearly inedible.  If you pass off your writing to other people without editing it is trash.  (Unless you won the word lottery, congratulations! You can retire to your own private literary island!)

"Oh no! My precious words! Everything I write is the best thing ever!  That’s how I feel!"  Nope.  It isn’t.  Other people will take one bite of your pastry, and if it tastes like shit, they will not take bite number two.

So how do you edit?  Same way you prepare a cake: let it cool, decorate it, and serve it on your best porcelain.  Think about what you wrote.  Take time with each sentence, every word.  Say it out loud.  Cut off the burnt pieces, the cliches, the clunky word flow, the lapses in grammar.  Frost your writing with a thesaurus. 

(At some point you will be able to edit AS you write, but this takes practice or else you might end up throwing everything you write away.  Writer’s block is overzealous editing, which is a topic for another post.)

I like the haiku format because it forces me to slow down and edit.  Unless I’m lucky and the words taste divine, I’m probably going to have to garnish my work before its tasty.

4) An Example.  I start with the thought:

"Good writing is something that is a good thought that you write down, and you do that a bunch and then you read what other people write and you figure out what is good then you edit it and then it has to echo through people like a drum."

Which is absolute drivel.  So I edit out the garbage:

"Good writing is something that is a good thought that you write down, and you do that a bunch and then you read what other people write and you figure out what is good then you edit it and then it has to echo through people like a drum.”

I check a thesaurus, and I find that “reverberate” is a stronger word than “echo”.  It also means I can get rid of “drum”.

"Good writing reverberates through people."

I look for words better than “people”.  I like the alliteration of “being”.  Also, this applies not just to writing, but to art in general.  A little bit of reformatting and I have:

good art /
reverberates /
in your being

#haiku #sixwords #poetry

meek poor crowds sake of /
shall comforted under god /
opened blessed heart

...

Words from the Bible.  Written for dVerse Poets Pub.

I Made A New Word

...

After Anne Billson tweeted there should be a word for "the anxiety you feel about not having the time to see all the films, read all the books or hear all the music," and Neil Gaiman retweeted her request, I took it upon myself to make a word for just such an occasion:

"Blunderclumped"

Then I submitted both word and definition to Urban Dictionary, and bam, word made. It's that simple.

Here's a haiku honoring the birth of a new word:

"blunderclumped" a word
at urban dictionary
english grows, huzzah!

...

Why You Should Never Read a Blog

I'm watching Lost on Netflix streaming at the moment, and I've come to the conclusion that I hate television.

I really do, but not in the way you are thinking. Rotting my brain with all the crappy people doing crappy things thrills me, so that's not the issue. What bothers me about normal t.v. shows is that they go on and on and on and on and on, for season after season after season.

Now it's not so irritating after the show is over, and I have a definite timeline for how many hours of my life a specific show is going to devour. In this case, Lost has six seasons, so I realized when I started that I needed to set aside a certain number of brain cells to kill. (Twenty seven neurons burn out every time Jack talks, just like Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn in LotR when he exclaims, "You cannot wield it! Weenie man, away!")

The same thing applies to a blog. They have indefinite endings. Whoever you are following is just going to keep blathering on about crap, and never really get to a conclusion. At least until they are dead, which is the one crucial advantage that books and movies have over television and blogs.

So I beseech you. Please, do not read blogs, at least until they have an exact stopping point. That way you are truly certain that once you start, you can see the end in sight.

Contentment Defined

Happiness <---> Unhappiness

As I alluded to in my last post on the subject, the above sliding scale is wrong. By this I mean, ineffective, counterproductive, and unlikely to make anyone anything other than ticking time bombs of self-destruction. For if you are not happy, then you must be unhappy, and since there are so few moments in your life when you are happy, then you must be unhappy the rest of the time.

Remember, I'm using these definitions:

Happiness = Pleasure + Triumph
Unhappiness = Pain + Grief

My prediction for everyone on the planet (and if I can't make that assumption, which is a fair objection, then I can at least make it for myself) is that there are relatively a few moments in our day to day lives where we are feeling true pleasure or triumph. So if you aren't happy, then by all accounts, if you only use the happiness/unhappiness scale, then you must be unhappy. You might not feel it, you might be doing your daily routines, wondering what is wrong with your life, your job, your kids, your hobbies, yourself: why you don't feel happy, and if that means you really are unhappy, underneath it all.

I propose that your life is not wrong, and that you are just fine, because your spectrum should look like this:

Happiness <---> CONTENTMENT <---> Unhappiness

I have put the middle term in all caps, because 90% of your life is smack dab in the middle. You are only up in the clouds 5% of the time, and you are only down in the dirt 5% of the time. The rest of your life is in that middle ground, where everything tastes like water, where you aren't too hot, aren't too cold, where you might not get what you want, but you might just get what you need.

Once you reorient yourself, once you stop seeking out the fleeting wisps of happiness, or rolling with the hard knocks, then you can perceive that who you are, no matter what you do, is an invisible path. Your life is the intangible middle ground. You will not remember it tomorrow, and you will not notice it all around you, until you stop, and pay attention to your contentment.

What is contentment? Well, let's define it further:

Physical Contentment = Flow

What is this? Flow? That sounds dumb. And yet, when an athlete is acting and reacting, without thought of failure, when they move like water, when they flow, then they are truly content. They are in the zone. When you are brushing your teeth, or vacuuming your carpet, or cleaning your toilet, or driving, or eating, or watching your kids play, or whatever concrete action you are doing when your life is moving on and on and on into the future, you are flowing with it and around it and through it, without thought, with and without effort, and you are water. Your life is mostly flow. It goes on, and you only notice the rapids and rocks in the river, while you ignore the river itself.

Abstract Contentment = Meditation

Huh? So we are all monks now? Do we have to sit cross-legged and chant "oooom?" If it helps you, sure, but I'm talking more the general use of the term, where your brain is occupied, but neither filled with triumph or grief. This is the place where daydreams go, or where you might think about the task at hand, or you might not be thinking at all. Your brain might be in idle, or it might be supercharged, working on your doctorate thesis. The key thing to notice here, is that we are talking about your day to day thoughts, combined with where your brain is when it is not thinking at all.

So where do we go from here? Now that we have a framework for contentment, we can notice it, and strive for it. We do not need to buy that car, or fuck that person, or wallow in our misery. Our goals can be a sustainable self, with contentment as our goal, and while the ups and downs of happiness and unhappiness might frame our lives, we are secure in the knowledge that we are content, and that everything is just fine after all.

Misinterpretation

"Justin, go get dressed! Mama Rose is coming to pick you up!"
Justin ignores me.
Five minutes later:
"Justin, go get dressed like I told you to!"
"Okay, I'll get dressed."
Justin comes back wearing this:
































Eh, what the hell...
If my kid wants to be a skeleton, so be it.

A Conversation With a 2.5 Year Old

She looks at me.
I look at her.
She smiles at me.
I smile at her.
She grins at me.
I grin at her.
She points at me.
I point at her.
She laughs at me.
I laugh at her.
I say, "What are you doing?"
She says, "I'm eating my butt!"

Happiness Defined

I recently wrote a reply to someone else's Facebook post that said:

"The source of modern unhappiness is, as it always has been, the belief in happiness."

Which is pretty much wrong.

I mean, there is an element of truth in there, because to a certain extent what you believe matters, however, there are also other ways to be unhappy that have nothing to do with your mindset, for example, (and this is something you can test) you can stub your toe. You could also break a leg, fall off a cliff, or convince someone to punch you in the face, all of which can be pretty unhappy.

Regardless of your mental outlook, pain is unhappy.

(For most people. Yes, there are people that have mismatched wires that think pain is super, but there are also all sorts of people with mental health issues, so for sake of argument, let's just assume that pain is a type of unhappiness.)

So let's define a couple of relationships then:

• Physical Happiness = Pleasure
• Physical Unhappiness = Pain

Seems pretty straightforward. Of course, this begs the question, what about the converse relationships? What about the non-physical realm? Well first off, let's use a better term for "non-physical;" I'm partial to "abstract." So what would we call the flip sides of these coins?

• Abstract Happiness = Triumph
• Abstract Unhappiness = Grief

Let's give these a closer look so that it's absolutely clear what I mean by these words. When I say "triumph," I am using that word to describe any situation where you have some sort of abstract happiness, like if you just got a great new job, you made a bunch of money, or you just graduated college. Maybe you just solved a problem that had been irking you, or wrote an excellent poem. Your baby nephew might have just been born, your favorite football team just won the Super Bowl, you just became President, or one of an infinite number of abstract situations that you feel victorious about.

On the flip side, grief is a mental unhappiness, from the loss of a great job, to losing it all in the stock market, to getting kicked out of college. Maybe you gave up on that problem because it was too difficult, or you just realized your poetry is horrendous. Your nephew might have just been killed in a car crash, your team went 0-16, you lost the election for class president, or one of an infinite number of abstract situations that you feel terrible about.

(I am aware that situations that can cause triumph and grief can and often do invoke pleasure or pain. For example, if a loved one dies, not only do you feel the mental anguish of them passing, but you also feel physical pain from that grief. This is because these labels are not mutually exclusive, meaning you can take pleasure and triumph from something, just as you can take pain and grief from something. Just be aware that because there is a link between the physical world and our minds, so too is there a connection between these emotional states.)

Let's add one more piece to the puzzle:

Assumption #1: There is nothing outside of Physical + Abstract.

What this means is that I am assuming that there is nothing outside of our existence that matters for the purpose of this discussion. I'm pretty much saying, "If you can't sense it or comprehend it, then who cares?" So that said, let's add up what we've thought about so far:

Happiness = Physical Happiness + Abstract Happiness
Happiness = Pleasure + Triumph

and

Unhappiness = Physical Unhappiness + Abstract Unhappiness
Unhappiness = Pain + Grief

...

Now, you may be saying, so what? What's the point?

Well, for starters, I can fix my Facebook post to mean something more truthful. Something like:

"The source of modern unhappiness is, as it always has been, pain, and the belief in triumph."

Which leads me to the third state of being, which I will leave for another post.

Fight Fire With Ice

I wrote this after I was called out for using the word "irregardless" in a forum post:

Some people might be interested in this link. Or this one. Or this one.

Then again they might not. They might believe it is their duty to point out any flaw in any person at every opportunity, irregardless of the circumstances, especially in a thread devoted to an entirely unrelated issue, in the hopes that their efforts will exasperate the discussion, and bring the entire enterprise crashing down in flames.

Luckily, I am made of ice, and do not care one whit how I spell things, or what people think about how I spell things. I realize that you are trying to help me learn how to spell, because it is obvious I am in dire need of such services, however, I am perfectly capable of finding an online dictionary myself. So thank you for your trouble, and let's endeavor to keep this discourse on track.

Yay! I Winzor!

I won a random geeky contest on Crispy Gamer, and I'm totally stoked. I'm glad that someone out there with at least a little bit of clout thinks that I can write a decent sentence.

(And yes, my winning entry was "Dude. My thumb has a crapload of pixels." Which took longer to write than you would think: I fully endorse the scriptwriter's credo that Less Is More, so I switched ideas multiple times, cut out extraneous words, and rearranged the structure of the sentence to put the punchline at the end. That one sentence took ten minutes to create.)

Then I read something along the lines of this, and I'm again humbled by someone who can put big words together and make sense. Perhaps it's because he's British.

It's my hope that in continuing this charade of a blog, that some skill with language develops over time, and that at the end of the process I'm a better writer than I would have been had I done nothing.

Fiction Writer's Block

Recently, I've been thinking about writing fiction, and I admit, I tend to be less than super coming up with narratives about imaginary people and places. (Which is not to say that I haven't in the past, I just haven't pursued it with any determination recently.)

I mean, sure, I can take the advice of every creative writing teacher I've ever had and write about what I know, however, at some point when writing something untrue you have to eventually come up with something fake. It has to be something fabricated enough to count as fiction without feeling artificial. The characters have to move and act and think and most of all talk in realistic ways without being real.

Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it) I tend to enjoy synthesizing aspects of ideas, and I am less than stellar understanding the motivations and desires of real people, let alone imitations that I've created. I'm getting better with time, and since the only way to continue improving is by doing it over and over again until I come up with something that isn't utter drivel, I had better get cracking and write something, even if the characters are wooden mouthpieces for my own philosophies.

It's better to have written poorly and sucked, than to have never written at all.

The Development of Comprehension

Since I am, for all intents and purposes, thrust into the trenches with two little ones, and I have little to no previous experience or theoretical basis, then it's no wonder I have zero preconceived notions about what kids are "supposed" to be like.

For example: I was at the park, and a mom asked me, "Does she understand what you are saying?" She was referring to my one year old after I had just said, "Harmony, come back here! Thank you." Honestly, it never occurred to me that she would be unable to understand me. Just because a toddler can't form the words doesn't mean they can't understand them.

An analogy is that even though I don't have the first clue how to play the piano, I can definitely listen and appreciate the music.

Like right now, as I'm typing this, I gave the kids some plums, and when Harmony left the kitchen with them, I said, "Harmony, go back in the kitchen. We eat fruit in the kitchen. Kitchen. Go. Thank you." She understood what I said, because not only did she go back in the kitchen, she also put the fruit on her table, then came back out with a big smile.

Combined with the feat that we also took away the pacifier at our kids' first birthday because 1) kids can't learn how to talk with a plug in their mouth and 2) it can be too easily abused by us as a way to get the kids to be quiet, means that not only are they understanding what we are saying, they also have plenty of opportunities to reciprocate.

Now I'm not saying that I'm perfect, or that ignorance is a virtue in this situation (or in any circumstance). Case in point, I was spanked growing up. Originally I thought that corporal punishment was acceptable as a last alternative, when every other tactic had failed.

However, the more experience I've had with kids has lead me to find out that I was wrong, and that my actions, though they worked in the short term, failed to provide any benefits in the long run. In addition, exactly like the torture of prisoners, regardless of whether it's effective, it is immoral. This is a human rights issue. We don't hit adults, so why is it that the littlest among us, who are the most vulnerable and in need of our trust and guidance, should be subjected to such agony?

I am so absolutely ashamed and pained that at one point I thought striking my kid was necessary, it makes me cry whenever I think about it, and all I can do at this point is vow that I will never hit my kids again. In Justin's words, "Spanking is hitting, and hitting is wrong."

Comprehension works both ways.

Research Dead End

I searched the internet for reliable data on a list of languages by total number of speakers, and I ran into a dead end. It seems like every site on the internet claiming to have an accurate list all stem from this one source: http://www.ethnologue.com/

I searched through the bibliography for any current studies that support this, and most of it apparently comes from outdated census data and guesswork.

The reason I was looking for this in the first place was to solidify claims that Mandarin Chinese was the world's most populous language, however, all I could find was the happenstance claims from random sites that all link back to Ethnologue. I can understand that it might be spoken by the largest number of native speakers, but that is really a moot point when what I really want to know is how many people speak each language, regardless of whether it's their first, second, third, or seventeenth language.

This paper interested me, because instead of giving raw facts without any sort of historical background, he synthesized the data into possibly trends. At this point though, I am equally doubtful of this information, since I'm unsure as to whether or not it has been peer-reviewed.

I seriously doubt that there are a huge influx of immigrants to China, and since Mandarin is not really a lingua franca, despite the emigration of many native speakers, I have doubts as to the influence of Chinese on the rest of the world. Especially since the trend has been thus far for other countries to learn English, while English speakers continue to propagate English. For an example of that, I would use this diagram. However, I am dubious as to my own bias, and the paper that published that study.

It would have been fascinating to find hard facts to illustrate the status of various languages in the world, however, at least for the moment, I haven't found anything rigid enough to support any valid conclusions.

A Safe Brainstorming Place

Let me be clear: this blog is for brainstorming any ideas and thoughts I happen to be interested in.

I am not in the business of telling anyone what to think or do. A lot of what I write here is flawed, and if taken into the sphere of reality without further consideration could turn out disastrous. I'm not running for public office, I'm not conducting scientific peer-reviewed research. These posts are half-baked, faulty, and, in many cases, flat out wrong.

You may be asking, then why say it? Why go to the trouble of criticizing a particular group or ideology, or proposing a new idea if I already know that something is amiss? Well, when I traverse into the chaotic jumble of unformed ideas, and shape them into something seemingly tangible, if I don't cage them in some form, then eventually they escape, and I'm lost with the sinking feeling that I forgot something, but I can't quite put my finger on what it was.

On the other hand, if I jot it down, then I get a relatively permanent place where I can reread what I thought about in the past, while simultaneously sharing that idea with anyone who is attracted to misshapen ruminations.

Why then am I posting this stuff on the internet? Something like a journal, which is only meant for myself, is the literary equivalent of vomit. It is not edited, it is not preened and ready to go out into the world. Words written for yourself are inherently different than words intended for an audience. The act of communication changes things.

Though, as I said before, just because I am composing this with an assembly in mind, doesn't mean that I'm attempting to zealously convert you to whatever it is I think. That's not my ambition at all.

In short: this is where I get to think about ideas before you or I decide whether or not they are total rubbish. If you like what I say, great, like it for yourself and form a course of action that suits you to you. If you hate what I say, be comforted in the notion that I probably goofed somewhere, and that I'm a dimwit.

Just be aware that while I fully support unrestrained thought, I detest unrestrained action.

The Language Barrier

I took my son to the park this evening. I love Cupertino, since I get to hear ten different languages spoken all around me, a river of unintelligible sounds. I'm too lazy to learn any of them, and I'm betting on the day when some smart person finally makes the Star Trek communicator, since barring us finding any intelligent extraterrestrial life, I most need one to converse with everyone who doesn't speak English.

I think that any device that can break down the language barrier would revolutionize all human contact from that point forward. Some sort of instant recognition hearing device that translates all incoming voices would be a possible first step, and anything beyond that would be amazing.

Granted, I could get off my idle butt and learn a language or two, which would not only make me smarter, but expand my worldliness quotient considerably. However, until I somehow manage to find a catalyst, I think I'm much more content to wade through the park, never really connecting to any of the people come into tenuous contact with.

At least until a gadget fixes it.