Blank page, blank mind

“White…a blank page or canvas…so many possibilities.”*

I’ve been thinking about writer’s block. I saw an interview with Fran Lebowitz in which I learned that after publishing two collections of essays, the last one in 1981, she has had writer’s block ever since.

1981.

32 years ago.

That’s a long time.

Not quite as long as Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960–but, let’s face it–if you wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, why wouldn’t you have writer’s block? For one thing, if you wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, why would you ever need to write anything else? And for another, why wouldn’t you be terrified that nothing else you wrote would ever measure up? (To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite book in the whole world. Can you tell?)

Ms. Lebowitz, asked about why she wasn’t writing, said “I don’t know. If I knew, I’d be writing.” She went on, however, to say, “Writing is work” and described herself as lazy.

Writing is work.

That’s certainly one reason I’m not writing when I’m not writing.

Let’s set aside the question of how Ms. Lebowitz has been making a living since 1981. Does she really get paid a sufficient wage to go on talk shows and be witty? She is witty as hell but really? Where can I get that gig? (For that matter, where can I get that wit?)

Writing is work.

It doesn’t seem like work to a person digging ditches, I suspect, but it is work.

The thing is. . .what makes it such hard work? That’s what I’m trying to understand. (The theory being that, like Ms. Lebowitz, if I knew why I’m not writing, I’d be writing. In reality, of course, if I can spend enough time thinking about why I’m not writing, I don’t have to actually write. See? A perfect system.)

One thing that makes it hard is thinking up something to write.

People speak of the “terror of the blank page,” and I used to think they were terrified at having to fill up that page. Now, I don’t think it’s fear of the volume of words needed to fill the page. I think it’s the fear that you won’t think of the first word.

It turns out, for me, that writing isn’t so hard. (It’s not easy–and I usually want to take a nap when I’m done–but it’s not like digging ditches). Coming up with something to get me started, however, is the killer.

That blank page has so many possibilities. Is it really the case that, with a universe from which to draw inspiration, I can’t think of one thing to put down on paper? Or is it that choosing one closes off all the others?

If the latter, writing this blog is certainly one antidote. Clearly, writing about one thing today leaves me with all the universe still available tomorrow.

It also leaves me with a host of tomorrows to continue to explore whatever I chose today. And this topic seems interesting. To me, at least. I think I’ll stick a pin in it for now and come back to it in some future post.

Meanwhile, let’s just put something down on that blank page.

* Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George

Act “As If”

Fake it ’til you make it

We’ve all heard that, right? The idea is that you pretend to a confidence you don’t actually have so that the pretense will provide access to real success and, thus, in some sort of cosmic feedback loop, to real confidence.

There are variations on this, unrelated to confidence, specifically. Proponents of the Law of Attraction encourage us to “act as if” we already have the things we want in order to draw more of them to us. Actors use a form of this called “working from the outside in,” on the theory that behavior influences emotion. Mothers use it, primarily, I think, to reassure children. (I was well into adulthood before I realized my mother was not necessarily as blasé about spiders and snakes and rodents as she pretended to be when I was young.)

All of those variations are fascinating to me and probably worth posts of their own, but today, I want to talk about haircuts.

(Don’t get whiplash from that double-take, now, as your mind attempts to grapple with the apparent change of subject. You heard me correctly. Haircuts.)

Inadvertently, I have conducted my own experiment in acting “as if.”

You see, it’s this way. I’ve been cutting my husband’s hair for a few months now. We moved down here to Florida, and he can’t find a barber he likes. Plus, we bought a house of that precarious architectural style known as a “fixer-upper,” so, you know — cash flow. If I cut his hair, there are a few more dollars for other things. Like spackle. And plumbers.

When we began this, I had never before cut anyone’s hair. Successfully, I mean. I frequently, in desperation and to avoid looking like a sheepdog, cut my own bangs. (It doesn’t usually work out well. Let’s not dwell on it.) Other than that, I’ve not come near anyone’s head with sharp implements.

But how hard could it be?

Clippers. Clippers are the solution. They sell them in the drugstore. They expect that people will make use of them, and you don’t hear about a lot of tragic haircutting accidents, so. . . . We decided to try it.

The MotH* was encouraging and full of helpful tips. (Me having sharp objects in my hand never deters him from telling me what to do. He is either very brave or very dumb. On any given day, my interpretation see-saws from one end of that spectrum to the other.) I watched YouTube videos about how to cut men’s hair with clippers. It didn’t go so badly. That was haircut # 1.

Haircut #2 was a whole different story. Several weeks had passed. I had forgotten most of what I learned in those videos. I didn’t re-watch them before attempting haircut #2. I was tentative and nervous and vocal about it. “Uh-oh” was a phrase that came all too frequently out of my mouth. The MotH got nervous. . .and testy. And he did not approve of his haircut after the first pass at it.

We took a break to re-think and re-group — and for me to re-watch my videos. A second pass, later that afternoon, righted most of the earlier–um–infelicities of the haircut. No lives were lost, although I could tell that the MotH’s appreciation of my help in barbering had diminished somewhat.

Yesterday, it was time for haircut #3. I approached it with anxiety. After all, I have had zero haircut’s worth of additional experience since the last time I did this. But I also made an internal resolution to pretend that it was going well even if I, myself, had doubts.

We set up the stool in the garage. I plugged in the clippers, spritzed the hair, and–like the actor I have sometimes been–proceeded to work from the outside in. I made sure that my physical motions were deliberate rather than hesitant. I handled the clippers and scissors with assurance and passed them over his head with conviction. I didn’t say, “Uh-oh,” in spite of thinking it more than once. When I was finished, I said, “I think that looks pretty good!” in a pleased, if slightly surprised, tone.

And here’s the fascinating thing. The haircut isn’t that much better than the previous one. In fact, objectively, I might say it is slightly worse than the revised version of the afternoon’s retake of haircut #2. (Only slightly. I wouldn’t send him out looking like he has been badly scalped!) It’s an okay haircut. No Rodeo Drive styling. Ordinary. Okay.

But he is much happier with it.

Fake it ’til you make it. Sometimes, if you fake it well enough, they won’t realize you haven’t totally made it.

And keep watching those hair cutting videos.

* MotH = Man of the House

Didn’t I ever tell you about Bumbles?

Bumbles bounce!

That, for anyone who has been living in a cave since 1964, is a quote from the Rankin/Bass Christmas TV special produced in stop motion animation and entitled Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. (If you have been living in a cave and want to see a little clip of the relevant section, click here.)

For some reason, it’s pretty much all I remember about that TV special–other than the totally unimportant fact that Rudolph’s girlfriend is named Clarice. But I do remember that line, because it always made me laugh. (Upon investigation, I discover that it was said by Yukon Cornelius–and wouldn’t you think that name would be the thing that made me laugh? It was his explanation of why he wasn’t killed when he fell over the cliff with the Abominable Snowman [the Bumble].)

I thought of it today for a totally unrelated reason. I find, to my surprise, that grasshoppers eat window screens. It’s not enough that they are tearing my plants to shreds. They have started in on the screens–which were not in the best of shape anyway.

When I discovered this, a voice–more like a wail–sounded inside my head. Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about grasshoppers eating screens? The next voice in my head was Yukon Cornelius’s Didn’t I ever tell you about Bumbles? And then I laughed.

(Nobody ever knows why I laugh suddenly for no apparent reason. Usually, I try not to do it out loud. As you can see, an explanation probably wouldn’t actually convince anyone that I am not crazy. But I am endlessly entertained by the amusing things bouncing around my brain, even if they are only amusing to me.)

The grasshoppers, however, are not amusing. They are destructive. I would have thought, as I posted previously, that the lizards would have helped me in this regard. But, no. We have to do it ourselves.

And another disconcerting fact about grasshoppers is that they don’t die quietly. They crunch. (Shudder!)

But this Friday’s Find is the worst.

The plants will grow back.

The screens, however, are not self-regenerating.

You’d think a grasshopper would find them indigestible. You’d think a grasshopper that was crazy enough to eat window screening would die quietly, poisoned by the aluminum or the fiberglass or whatever it is. But no. They continue on their inexorable path.

I like to live in harmony with all living things, but I gotta say. . .I’m starting not to mind the crunch so much.

The secret of all victory…

…lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

I’m not quite sure what Marcus Aurelius meant by that. It sounds good, though, don’t you think? I may wonder about that on some future Wondering Wednesday, but today is Thankful Thursday. And so. . .

I am thankful today that technology has provided us with so many ways to help us organize the obvious and the non-obvious. Maybe too many, but that’s a separate issue.

I have a lot of To Do lists. And I keep looking for the perfect tool to manage them. So, right now, a big item on my To Do lists is to merge them all into one master list. I haven’t quite accomplished that yet, because each of the tools I use has different strengths, and picking one has been difficult.

It probably doesn’t matter which one I pick. I really just need to choose one and use it with obsessive-compulsion. I’ll work on that.

In the meantime, I thought you might want to take a look at some of the candidates and see if there’s anything here that would work for you.

The most recent find is Remember the Milk–an online To Do list that will email you reminders of tasks. I haven’t done much experimentation with it, but it looks straightforward and relatively easy. You have to sign up for a free account, however, and your list resides on their server. I’m not quite sure I like that. Just how private will it be?

On the other hand, I can carry a list in my pocket on a PDA or a smartphone. I have to say that I don’t much care for the Task List in my Blackberry. The one in my Palm Pilot is/was much more versatile. Easier to view, to sort, to print, to reschedule tasks and to categorize them. Plus, the Palm reminder alarms are more insistent than the Blackberry, and they stay on the screen. The Blackberry lacks most of that functionality. It will activate a brief alarm, but if you’re not near it at the time, the notification will have disappeared. The next time you pick it up, you’ll have no idea. It makes the Blackberry task list nearly worthless.

An organization tool that is a lot of fun–and takes significant disk space and memory to run–is The Personal Brain. You can link all kinds of documents and ideas and websites together in multiple configurations. This makes it possible to organize your tasks and thoughts in more than one way. You can look at things according to project or according to which things you can accomplish at your computer or according to almost any other hierarchy you want to take the time to try. On the downside, I haven’t figured out how to print lists of any kind, it’s a bit time-consuming to set it up, and it does take a lot of hardware resources to run smoothly. But it’s fun to see everything you’ve entered float around as you rearrange the connections, and it’s kind of cool to say “Let me just check my Brain.”

Another free program that I’ve found to be useful is Stickies. It’s like having electronic sticky post-it type notes. I used to list a lot of items in a sticky until my friend Carole mentioned that she creates one sticky per task so the notes are all over the monitor. It’s very satisfying to close them as the tasks are completed. The link above is for the PC version, but I’m fairly sure there’s something similar for Mac users.

All of those tools have some value. And, of course, you can always use a pencil and paper or a Word document (outlines can be useful to organize a To Do list in Word). The one tool to which I find myself returning most often is one I can’t really show you. I developed it myself in Microsoft Access, and while it still needs work, it has many of the features I like. It lets me organize by broad categories with increasing granularity through projects and sub-projects down to actual tasks. I can set due dates and priorities and print various lists. It doesn’t buzz at me, though, when something is looming. Someday, I’ll see if I can’t add that to it.

Meanwhile, I think I should probably actually do something instead of spending all my time making lists.

But remind me sometime to talk about the progress bars we set up a few months ago. They were an amazing productivity tool!

***

(Update for the email subscribers: We’re still trying to figure out why the emails aren’t going out every day. I am posting every day, and you should get two links the day after a skipped post. You can always find it on the website if you’re wondering. My continued apologies for the currently inexplicable. I think it’s gremlins.)

Patches of quicksand. . .

. . .and some mines in the field.*

This is already shaping up to be a weird post.

I haven’t really lost my mind. I think. It’s just that I was wasting time yesterday (such an unusual occurrence!) by surfing the ‘net, and I came across this strange “fact.” I started to wonder how anyone knew it to be a fact, and why it was a fact, and of course, my next thought was: Wondering Wednesdays!

Ergo, I’ve been wondering about this oddball thing ever since.

What was the “fact?” you ask.

Well. . ..here goes. . .but don’t hold it against me if you find yourselves wondering about this, too, and then wondering why.

The “fact” is as follows:

A donkey will sink in quicksand,but a mule will not.

Now, seriously–who comes up with this stuff? Is this a phenomenon somebody has actually observed? Have there been controlled experiments? Are there people out there dumping hapless donkeys and mules into quicksand?

And doesn’t the SPCA frown on that sort of thing?

Setting aside the question of how this piece of esoterica came to be discovered, aren’t you wondering why it should be the case? Are mules naturally more buoyant than donkeys? Really? Are they smarter? I mean, is it possible that a donkey–having fallen into a pit of quicksand–will thrash around wildly and sink deeper and deeper while a mule–in the same predicament–is smart enough to be still and slowly extricate itself?

I’ve known a couple of donkeys and mules in my life–the four-legged kind–don’t get me started on the number of two-legged specimens I’ve known–and I am fairly comfortable with the statement that mules are not smarter than donkeys. They’re not dumber, either, as far as I can tell. I’d say the IQs are probably within a few points of each other.

I am not swearing to it that this is a fact. I have no quantitative knowledge of the relative intelligence of the various members of the horse family, the Equidae. (But isn’t “Equidae” a kind of cool word?)

I also make no comment on thinking whoever came up with this donkey/mule/quicksand item might have been similarly circumspect,and perhaps–just perhaps–not have made this kind of categorical and, apparently unfounded, statement without providing just a little more background and context for it.

I will say that I now have valuable information about what to do if I ever fall into a pit of quicksand, and I hereby pass it on to you–just so the day won’t be a total waste. Click here to read some instructions and see a video. I can also reassure you that your chances of falling into said pit are probably not high in spite of its prevalence in every jungle movie I’ve ever seen as a child. So, no need to wonder about that.

What is worth a little wondering is the quote I came up with for a headline today:

“Retirement can be a bit of a wonderland. But there are some patches of quicksand and some mines in the field.“*

I think that’s patently true–because I’ve “retired” from my money job, and I’m supposed to be writing, and here I am wondering about donkeys in quicksand. If that’s not a mine in the field, I don’t know what is.

* Ken Dychtwald

What’s in a name?*

A character by any other name. . .

Naming characters is one of those things that makes me crazy.

If you’ve had children–and if you haven’t, you can just imagine–you know the hours of consideration, the lists and lists of names that go into finding just the right name for this new little person.

Now, multiply that by–I don’t know–some horribly large number, and you have a little bit of an idea of a writer’s naming burden.

The average number of children per household in the U.S., according to the 2010 census, is 0.94. That’s not even a whole person!

You really can’t write a book or a play without a whole person. Okay, you could write The Wind in the Willows or Freddy the Detective or one of those other children’s books filled with talking animals–but once an animal begins to talk, it has to have a name, so you’re back where you started.

If you’re going to write, you’re going to be naming people all the time. All the time.

Seriously, every time you turn around, you are going to be adding people to your play or your story, and most of them will need names. Minor characters can be “the waitress” or “the bus driver,” I suppose, and if you want your writing to appear really symbolic, I guess you could name them with capital letters. “The Waitress.” “The Bus Driver.” Usually, however, these people you just made up will need to have names, and unlike Dr. Seuss or George Foreman, you probably don’t want them all running around your pages with the same name.

There are all kinds of theories about naming babies, and I’m sure there are as many about naming characters.

The only real tip I have to offer this Tuesday is a couple of websites where you can find the online equivalent of a baby book.

http://www.babynames.com/

and my personal favorite, the random name generator:

http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm

You can find other online resources here.

Happy naming!

* Shakespeare again. Romeo & Juliet, remember? From yesterday? Act 2, sc 2

The play’s the thing*

And good actors don’t hurt

Today’s Monday Miracle actually happened yesterday when I went to see the last performance of The 5 & Dime’s production of Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts.

Now, I’d seen Next Fall previously, in New York, in its Off-Broadway incarnation, produced by Naked Angels. That production moved to Broadway–with the help of some perceptive commercial producers who recognized a good thing when they saw it. Clearly, they were not the only ones, because it was nominated for two Tonys: Best Play and Best Direction of a Play.

I’m on a mission to see what kind of theatre is being produced in and around my new home in the Jacksonville, FL area. Google led me to The 5 & Dime, among other theatres, and they were the first one with a show currently running.

I’ll be honest and say that my expectations were not high. (They weren’t especially low, either. I suppose they were non-committal.)

The 5 & Dime is a nomadic company. They don’t have a space of their own, and they mount their productions in various spaces in and around Jacksonville. At best, that says to me that they are a young company. At worst, it conjures up memories of the seediest of black box theatre off-off-off-off-broadway. (I’ve worked in some of those off-off-off. . .offs. The quality of the work can be very high. Or not. The spaces, though, are almost uniformly in a state of what we might describe as “run-down.”)

Their name. . .well, I loved Woolworth’s and the other five-and-dime stores. . .but you have to admit calling a theatre company The 5 & Dime doesn’t give it the same aura as calling it, say, the Nederlander or the Schubert or the National. A rose by any other name. . .,** however.

In addition, it didn’t appear from their marketing material that the cast is made up of Equity actors. Again, this does not mean it can’t be good. There are some very fine non-union actors.

So, I went–hoping for good theatre but prepared for the possibility of something somewhat less. I knew it wasn’t going to be bad. After all, the script is terrific. But was it going to measure up to the version I saw in New York?

How wonderful to find a little gem of a show in a great space with high production values and a very strong cast! Deserving of special mention: Antoinette D’Amico was really terrific as the mother, and Kevin Roberts and Joe Walz turned in excellent performances as Adam and Luke.

And I can’t remember her name, but the president of their Board gave what is possibly the best curtain speech before a show that I’ve ever heard.

It was a lovely afternoon at the theatre — funny and moving and thought-provoking — and I am definitely going back to see their next show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

In fact, I’m looking forward to it!

* Shakespeare again! It’s always a good day when I get to quote Shakespeare. This one’s from Hamlet, Act 2, Sc. 2.

** And again. Another Act 2, sc. 2. This time it’s Romeo & Juliet.

Back to the Present

Kingsley Lake – Pt. 2

We had a great time at Kingsley Lake yesterday, even though the sandy beach I think I remember is either no longer there or off-limits to those entering through Camp Blanding.

Camp Blanding is an interesting experience all by itself. The main gate is surrounded by various military vehicles on display as part of the Camp Blanding World War II Museum. The Museum, by the way, is open to the public, and we’ll go back someday to take a look at that. It’s just the base itself that you cannot enter without special permission.

And they mean it!

There was a slight mx-up over the guest list, and we were not allowed to enter until it was resolved. They got it figured out, however, and we proceeded to drive through the base to the RV park where active and retired members of the military are permitted to camp.

Standard base housing and office buildings. Straight lines of military precision.

And, then, oddball speed limit signs randomly changing within feet from 15 mph to 30 mph and back again for no apparent reason. I don’t know what that’s about.

The RV hookups are right on the edge of the lake, beautifully maintained, each with a grill and a picnic table. There is a carpet of pine needles down to the reeds and a lot of recreational watercraft moored just off shore.

It seems that there is more boating and jet ski-ing than swimming , although we did see a few people in the water. We didn’t take a dip ourselves because of an impending thunderstorm.

It’s a beautiful spot, but without the beach, it rang no bells in my memory at all.

We’ll have to plan a trip to Goldhead and see if any vestiges of past glories remain there. Meanwhile, my lost youth remains lost.

Time Travel

Kingsley Lake – Part 1

If you read yesterday’s post, you might think that today’s headline has to do with the ongoing investigation into why the emails don’t always get delivered to subscribers.

You’re wrong!

Today, I’m talking about a different sort of time travel. Because, today, I am traveling backwards through time to visit a lake I used to go to as a child.

This is a dangerous thing to do. Often, such a journey is destined to disappoint. Things are rarely as good–or as bad–as you remember them. They are, certainly, never as big! I remember how astonished I was at the smallness of the New Orleans school I had attended for kindergarten when I saw it again in my twenties.

Kingsley Lake, however, is unlikely to disappoint. For one thing, it can’t be much smaller. Wikipedia lists it as 2,000 acres. That’s pretty big by any standards. The lake’s own website says it is 2 miles in diameter and a very stable lake, so it will not have shrunk as I have grown.

Then, too, I don’t know that I remember it all too clearly. We used to go to Goldhead Lake, as well, so it is entirely possible that I have the two lakes mixed in my mind. I’m fully prepared not to recognize anything.

I am interested to see it, though.

It’s almost perfectly round which seems unusual to me in a naturally occurring body of water. Apparently, pilots call it Silver Dollar Lake because of the roundness. Nobody knows, but it may have been formed by an ancient sinkhole.

What does surprise me is the discovery that there is no longer any public access to the lake. I’m absolutely sure I remember being able to drive right to it. Apparently, however, when the surrounding land was sold for housing, nobody realized or thought it important enough to do anything about the fact that the public access disappeared.

The only way you can get to Kingsley Lake now is a) know one of the homeowners or b) be a member of the military (Camp Blanding, the primary base for the Florida National Guard sits on the east and south sides of the lake).

Fortunately, I got connections!

My cousin-in-law is a retired Master Chief. He and his wife go RV camping there, and he is going to put us on the list so that the guards will let us onto the base.

I’ll let you know how it goes and what the lake is like now.

In the meantime, I suppose the take-away from this post in terms of career is connections are important–and you never know who can get you where you want to go.

Something wacky is happening

. . .in the Space-Time Continuum

I have fallen into a chasm that yawns between WordPress, FatCow and MailChimp.

Woe is me.

It’s Friday, and instead of bringing you a fantastic Friday Find–something useful or fun or inspiring–I am on a mission to discover, once and for all, why these blog posts don’t always email to my long-suffering subscribers.

Unfortunately, it seems to involve higher math. Time zones. UTC offsets. Daylight Savings Time. And, really, for a person who actually passed calculus classes, it is sad how bamboozled I am by time calculations.

Of course, it’s quite likely I’d be bamboozled by differential equations now. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I wasn’t then. I’ve never really understood how I passed calculus. Although, I’m fairly certain it had a lot to do with one fabulous teacher, Miss Impagliazzo at Concord High School.

In the meantime, when I have to figure out times, I turn to one of the best inventions ever: The Sun Clock which is a graphical representation of day and night and local times around the world. (If you want tables of local times, try the World Clock. )

But neither of those clocks seem to be helping me now.

All I know now is that my subscribers might have missed the squirrel post and/or the world in motion post, and MailChimp thinks it’s because the posts were published after the email was scheduled to go out. But I think that the published time at which they are looking is UTC time and not Eastern Daylight Time, so they didn’t publish after the scheduled email time.

Except, you know, it’s like higher math–so I am not sure at all. More research is indicated.

For those of you who don’t know, UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time. (Don’t ask me why its acronym is not CUT. I guess they didn’t want to use a real word.) It replaced Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the standard for time in 1986. So far, my search has revealed that UTC is based on atomic measurements rather than the earth’s rotation. Thus, it is supposed to be more accurate.

I’m just trying to get this blog to people’s inboxes every morning. So I don’t really need the precision of atomic seconds. I need a schedule that could be described as “around 9-ish.” How hard is that?

So far, everyone is confused. WordPress asks me what time zone I’m in. So, you’d think it would understand that when I schedule a post for a certain time, I mean in my time zone. Research, however, has indicated that they might mean UTC time. And the email service says they need about 5 hours between posting and the scheduled distribution time. But what time zone are they using? And my web host is just confused. (Join the club.)

I’m thinking that some of this problem must be that WordPress is using UTC time in the scheduling and disregarding the local time zone.

So….today, we are experimenting. This post is scheduled to publish at 4:10 am on July 27th. The email is scheduled to go out at 9 am.

If the WordPress time and the MailChimp time are both local, there are 4 hours and 50 minutes between publishing and emailing–and it should work.

If one is UTC and the other local, there are only 50 minutes between publishing and emailing–and it might work.

If….oh, forget it! Let’s just see what happens. And today, while you’re reading this–if you’re reading this–I’ll be trying to get somebody to tell me what is happening in which time zone.

If you’re not reading this, I’ll be doing the same thing but you may never know it.

And if, by any chance, you have ever wondered why I don’t write sci-fi time travel stories, I trust the reason is now clear to you and that you are properly grateful.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants