No Chaser

Greenaway strikes again

YouTube is one reason I won't be limiting my computer use to email and word processing. (But I did send out my first letter yesterday.)



I do so love this man.

posted by: NoChaser at October 27, 2006 07:50 | link | comments (3) |

Hmmm

I have been very seriously considering eliminating all use of my computer outside of word processing and a thrice weekly check of email.  I already read blogs only once a week and many less often than that.  With coursework and work-work and recreation increasingly mediated by the computer, I feel I spend more time enrapt by the virtual than I spend in the material world.  In terms of temporal and spatial reality, this can be a bit confounding.

On a related note, Clonkster and I were walking today and bemoaning anew the loss of letter-writing among friends.  We have both had long, creative, and fruitful mail correspondences that have been lost to email, IM, and cell phones.  What I miss most about those communiqués is the intimacy of a letter that conveys the writer's distinct character via paper choice, handwriting, ink color and type, pen pressure, drawings, even scent.  And, the intimacy extends to content as people are far less likely to share very personal things via email since it's so re- and mis-sendable. 

We have often discussed starting a letter-writing campaign to bring back the letter.  Clonkster even joked that he would begin responding to emails only via post, which is of course untenable.  And, actually, the reason I blog and email and whatnot is to keep up more regularly with friends in far-off places.  Electronic communication also offers the benefit of economy; instead of writing, say, ten letters, I write a blog entry and maybe three longish emails a week. 

When I sit down to write a letter, the person I am writing to is present, and I write something just for them.  That's certainly not so for my blog or even an email, both of which have a potentially much larger audience.  Since I started blogging (three blogs ago), I have also stopped writing in a journal.  I don't draw as much.  I rarely write a letter.  In fact, I probably don't even have the street addresses of many of my friends.  I feel this should change.  

posted by: NoChaser at October 22, 2006 16:07 | link | comments (2) |

Links

I almost never post links, but today two things I have found lately that I love:

Monster Engine

and

Library Thing.

Relates to age . . . both are fun for all ages?  Okay, not so much.  Probably only the first is fun for all ages, and the second is fun for compulsive people over say 15 who really like books.

posted by: NoChaser at October 10, 2006 21:25 | link | comments (1) |

Intrusive Bastards

In the last two weeks, I have received five [make that six; they just called again not one hour later] phone calls from the same 800-number.  I do not answer it because it is an 800-number and not a number I otherwise recognize.  Today, I became annoyed by the 800-pest, and decided to find out who it is.  A quick google of the 800-number pulls up a company in Texas that is responsible for publishing any number of alumni directories.  My guess is they are the creeps producing my high school alumni directory since they have also sent me at least nine postcards asking me to call and give them my info.

Here's my assessment of their services:  stupid intrusive bullshit bordering on harassment.  I mean, come on, I am obviously not interested.  Leave me alone stalkers.

In keeping with this month's theme, this post is relevant to age in two ways: 1) I am old enough to have an alumni directory company trying to get my info for my high school, which is not saying much, and 2) I am old enough to have inflexible opinions about certain "joining" and networking mentalities that make me utterly uninterested in alumni directories.

posted by: NoChaser at October 08, 2006 12:53 | link | comments (4) |

October

October is Offical No Chaser Birthday Month.  I will spend the month looking forward to my birthday and pestering Señor C to tell me what my present is.  I will undoubtedly plan a trip out of the Land of Corn to celebrate my birthday.  This year, I may also do some jokey whining about my age and state of physical deterioration to anyone who will listen good-humoredly. 

Since I started in last month already with the age thing, musing on middle age, I think I will spend October posting random thoughts on the subject of age.  To begin . . .

Two high school students tried to pick up on me this week.  Since I am probably older than their mothers, I can only conclude they were pulling my leg.  Either that, or "kids these days" have a perverse thing for older women.  I hasten to add, however, that I am not a MILF.  I'm not a mom for one thing.  Nor do I dress like a any version of mom I'm familiar with.  I definitely do not have a mom vibe.  I don't much like kids.  I actually loathe teenagers.  I think most people who know me would agree that I am decidedly un-momish.

This has happened to me before, but it's usually at least college students.  Whenever it happens, I think of the scene in Valley Girl where you think the guy is sleeping with his girlfriend's mom because they'd been flirting with each other, but in fact he is sleeping with the girlfriend.  And, I think how very unlike that mom I am.

I am fairly small, so a lot of times people think I'm young simply because I'm a shrimp, and maybe that's what was going on.  All this denial makes me realize that I am trying hard not to accept the likelihood that any woman over a certain age seems to a much younger person to have a mom vibe, to look like a mom, to seem intrinsically momish.  

posted by: NoChaser at October 05, 2006 18:41 | link | comments (2) |

Time to write

The half-drafted novel has been on hold for a few months now, and I am thinking about it all the time.  I have spent the last month-and-a-half getting as much work for the semester out of the way as possible, and yesterday, I spent a little time (after my awesome book arts workshop) figuring out how much I have finished and how much is left to be done in how much time.  This includes classwork, administrative/planning crap, and outside jobs such as editing and column-research/writing.

I am pleased to report that my calculations find me with plenty of time to begin fiction work afresh after next weekend.

I generally find that time away from writing projects is beneficial, as long as the break is not so long that you abandon all hope, and this is no exception.  I had been having a very hard time deciding how to make my main antagonist sympathetic in some way, rounder and bearing less of the burden of badness in the book.  I had discovered ways to share out the badness (not at all difficult considering my topic -- academia), but the main baddie was still functioning as a container for all my ill will. 

A conversation with RG about a shockingly mean colleague she's currently trying to understand sparked my thoughts on the subject.  RG had some good insight into why this person behaves the way she does, and how we might feel some sympathy for her.  This led to a discussion with Señor C about a real-life baddie he has been working to feel sympathy for.  RG and Señor C's analysis of their personal academic adversaries helped lead me to a solution for my bad-guy character.

I realize that this sounds as if I have trouble generating sympathy for people, and that's not the case.  In fact, I am often chastised for being friendly with fairly unlikeable people, and I will go years being friends with someone others find repellent because I see something sympathetic in their characters and maintain hope that those qualities will eventually prevail.  In terms of generating sympathy, then, the trouble I have occasionally is with discovering what is truly sympathetic in a person.  

When I was in high school, my friend S was in a production of Oliver, playing Nancy to a kind of creepy guy's Bill Sykes.  This was a guy we knew well from our social web as a smug alcoholic leerer.  Appropriate casting for Bill Sykes actually.  Sadly, though, this meant S had to generate some kind of feeling for him in order to play Nancy's love for Bill.  I was sort of friends with him (see above) and made several suggestions about this fellow's few appealing qualities, but none of that worked for S; what evoked sympathy in me did not in her.  Eventually, she decided he had beautiful eyes in which she could detect some kindness and vulnerability, and she went from there.

So, sympathy is subjective, which makes perfect sense once you think about the mechanism for sympathetic identification.  This means, too, that everyone generates sympathy differently.

RG recently confronted major betrayals by the two people she had grown closest to in her new setting.  Fortunately, she has been working to build a more supportive network of friends in the last several months, so she is not free-falling into despair.  Unfortunately, her life is still enmeshed with the jerks in various ways, so she doesn't have much space to nurture the animosity she necessarily feels for them.  She also is quite dedicated to not harboring negative emotions and instead filling her heart and mind with compassion.  Immediately after withstanding a few really hard punches to the gut, she was already finding something sympathetic in these people.  I find this admirable.

I am not so nice.  I usually need to feel my anger, disgust, resentment for a while before I am ready to feel compassionate.  This doesn't mean that while I may wish for someone to spontaneously combust that I would not try to rescue them from the self-incited flames.  In large part, this is a reaction formation from my childhood wherein these feelings led to an important protective avoidance of potentially dangerous situations.  And, now, when I have very complex feelings with many layers of negative emotion about something or someone, I will withdraw until I sort them out.  This is usually good for the anatagonist as prolonged exposure to them when I feel that way almost always exacerbates the bad feelings until that is all I experience.  

I expect that is why it is also good for me to take breaks from writing projects, and why, in this case, it has been especially good for the bad guy.

posted by: NoChaser at October 01, 2006 04:55 | link | comments (2) |