Enthusiastic Failure

I found one of my old diaries this week.

It’s mostly from 2001, but there’s one entry dated 2003. My fake-whiny-depressive-emo years. Yeah, i was one of those kids. Even if i’d written every day, i doubt i’d have any accurate records of that time of my life, because i was busy making every problem i had out to be a big deal. To re-read any of my writings, i had the worst life ev-ar and nothing i did would ever make it any better.

I actually don’t feel particularly bad about this. Yeah, if i could tell my seventeen-year-old self anything, it’d probably be something like ‘Oh, quit whining,’ but what teenager doesn’t have an over-dramatic, over-emotional, my parents are so horrible and nobody will ever understand me and life sucks! phase? Everyone i know did. Different ages, different reactions, and some have quite frankly never grown out of it, but everyone went through it.

My rather poor choice of how to handle the Over-Dramatic Years consisted of picking at every problem outside of my control until they eclipsed all the problems i could control, making my life out to be one big dramatic mess. I knew even back then it was a load of bullshit, but at the time this made me feel better – or at least i thought it did: ‘Look at my awesome self, managing to handle all these horrible disasters. Okay, so i’m not actually doing anything with my life yet, but give me a break, look at all the stuff preventing me from even managing the bare necessities!’

I thought i was proving myself to be strong. In reality i was proving myself to be weak – too weak to solve any problems on my own, to do anything but roll over and blame everyone and everything else for my problems. Self-deception of the most irritating form.

Actually, the really irritating bit is i’m starting to slip into those old patterns of self-deception again. You’d think i’d have learned my lesson, and i have, to a certain extent: i’ve settled on ‘content’ instead of ‘miserable’ this time around. I even occasionally poke ‘happiness’ with a stick. ‘But, but, but, i can’t do What-i-Want X because i don’t have enough money and i can’t get more money at work because of Problem Y and i can’t get more money outside work because of Problem Z…’

Quit yer bellyachin’, Emo Sherry.

random other stuff…

• I will stop linking to random Cat and Girl comics when they stop being horribly appropriate for the situation.
• I also like Gretchen Rubin’s post on positive arguments, if for no other reason than because it gives me an excuse to argue with myself :P

I submitted the first chapter of Angels Unaware to Critique Circle for feedback.

Crits thus far can be summed up as ‘Cut this, cut this, this is okay but not really necessary, cut this, and… okay, you just. um. have a tendency to overwrite in general.’

I imagine overwriting is a common problem amongst NaNoers. ‘Dammit i’ve been writing for three hours, i haven’t slept in two days, and i’ve still got fifty words to hit today’s word count… fine! Make the President’s speech longer!’

Ha – so much for reloaning my Kiva funds every time my account gets $25. It reached $50 without me noticing. Ah well.

Also the easiest time i ever had choosing loans – there were only two up when i logged in (probably because it’s 12:30 Sunday morning, and whoever normally adds new loans to the site isn’t up to replenish whatever gets fully funded.) Rather than wait for new loans to be added (and completely forget about them, again) i just funded both the remaining ones – both Iraqis who sell women’s clothing. I’ve looked for Iraqis to loan money to the last few times i was on Kiva anyway, so i’m happy with this.

Something which amuses me more than it should: The #1 lending team on Kiva is, as it has been every time i look, the atheist group. It’s currently lent out $1,498,925.00. The #2 team is a Christian group, at $886,325.00. Maybe i just spent too much time as a kid being told how awesome we Christians are for our generosity, but this makes me outright giddy.

I’m reading Clock Repairing as a Hobby, though i’m not sure i’m actually understanding it at any practical level. It probably doesn’t help i bought the Kindle version, and am thus reading it mostly off the tiny screen of my Touch – which is great for most books but not so great for books with tons of diagrams ending up about five tiny page-flips away from the paragraphs describing them. Still, if i’d bought a dead-tree version i’d just sit it on a shelf to browse occasionally instead of stuffing it my pocket to actually read, and as i have neither horology tools nor spare clocks to take apart i’d not likely retain any of the knowledge anyway.

Despite not understanding most of it, i’m at least thinking about things i’d never considered before. Like chimes. It somehow never occurred to me to wonder how century-old clocks can functionally chime the hour, or even play little bits of music. It’s one of those things i still don’t nearly understand, something about a little snail-wheel with twelve steps moving a bit every hour and the chime levers being triggered X number of times based on what step they end up on when some other lever does something else… Right. It’s a brilliantly clever system, though, and i’m wondering now how i managed to go so long without ever stopping to think ‘Wait, there’s no computer in there telling it how many times to chime – how does it do that?!?’

I think this is the first time in my life i’ve been almost sad by how easy computers make everything. Necessity being the mother of invention, in the old days, when horologists needed their clocks to make noise every hour, they had to design complex and beautiful systems of gears and levers. Now we can do the same with a few lines of code. Even if some brilliant engineer were trying to build an analogue clock with no previous knowledge how they worked, e’d probably use some sort of computer workings instead of gears for the chiming bit. Maybe even the chimes would be mechanical, but triggered – and timed – not by gear trains, but little sets of electrical contacts lining up on the hours… lovely, but just not the same.

Of course, they also had to readjust the pendulums practically every time the weather changed, and pull out the mechanics every few years for cleaning, and do a ridiculous amount of other stuff which more than cancels out the brilliance of the gears. But still. Chimes.

Food-Tracking: Done. I even tracked my tea consumption, which was kind of a bitch as i drink around seven cups of tea a day and being only about four calories a cup, there’s not much motivation to track. But i did.
Apparently i don’t eat enough in general and my carb:protein ratio is way off. Fat intake was perfect, though. So apparently i just need to eat more protein. Bring on the meat!
(…which will also up my fat, but lower my carbs, and i think a goodly amount of my carbs came in the fattening-junk-food form, so if i actually eat less carbs due to being full up from protein, it’ll maybe balance out. I have no idea how nutritionists and the like keep from going insane.)

I worked on other stuff this week, too. Lots of other stuff. I did research on various things and started scripting ideas for my webcomic and worked on my novel.

I feel really distant from it all now, though… Suffice to say i had multiple tea-and-computer mishaps this week, culminating in a keyboard which refused to work (and the Getting of a Travel Mug, aka ‘sippy cup for grown-ups’). So Friday was spent ordering a new laptop keyboard and trying to convince local computer stores that yes a non-Apple USB keyboard will work with a Mac stop telling me it won’t before a Grizzly Old Computer Expert suggested pouring a bit of alcohol over the offending keyboard. And now everything works except my brain, which thinks it’s still supposed to be fixing stuff and has a particular type of ‘but why am i not applying a screwdriver to this problem?’ sort of ADHD.

random other stuff

• A Rant About Women. But a nice ‘Ladies, you can kick way more ass than you actually do’ kind of rant.
• Logitech has a wireless keyboard app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Which i totally could have used three days ago. Yay timing.

if xkcd says it's good, it's good enough for me.

Turns out it’s kind of tough to decide on a programming language to learn. I don’t want to learn just one – i want to learn Python, Perl, and PHP at the very least, and probably in the future some variety of C.

I know a bit of Perl and PHP already, but for the purposes of learning one new language at some point in the next two years, i think i’m going to go with Python for now. It’s supposed to be ridiculously easy to learn, and the whole reason i already know any Perl and PHP is because they keep popping up in personal projects.

Logically i should be reasoning ‘since i keep using them, they are obviously useful to me and i should learn to use them properly’, but i’ve got the feeling everything i haven’t learned yet is stuff i only don’t know because i consider it boring or useless or over-complicated. I know there will be boring, complex and seemingly useless bits in pretty much any programming language, but at least if i’m starting from scratch i’ll be learning the interesting bits alongside the boring bits.

random other stuff:

• Tarot Dame crocheted an awesome little bag for one of her decks. I kind of want one but there’s no yarn in the world which will actually look proper with my Russian tarot :P Maybe some of those scraps of faux leather i have lying around…
• Ever wonder why people who seem to be total idiots make tons of money? There’s a Salary Theorem for that…

At some point during NaNoWriMo i heard of Tarot for Writers, which uses tarot cards to brainstorm character personalities and plot outlines. I’ve been lusting after it ever since and finally gave in and downloaded the Kindle version last night and have been drawing cards for my novel characters (especially the borderline random and unrealistic minor ones).

It’s far more oriented towards writers who are just starting their novels than those who have already written one and are trying to edit, but it’s still proving useful. At the very least it’s prodding me to be a bit more creative – most other tarot spreads, if they touch on personality or backstory at all, do so in the sense of how it all affects a bigger problem. The Tarot for Writers spreads don’t have the whole ‘real live person with a backstory you can’t change on a whim’ limitation.

It has awesome plot-outlining bits, too. I’m going to go nuts with this next November… i’m already having trouble resisting the urge to play around with the various plot spreads. Maybe by the time i’m done pulling cards to work on a whole small cult worth of character design the novelty will have worn off a bit.

random other stuff

• I somehow suspect i’m going to end up with a copy of Out of the Box & On the Page before i’m done editing. Right now i need more editing advice than idea-generating advice, though.
• The ‘post-literate’ Cat and Girl strip makes me giggle – though i admit to being on the pro-spelling side. And the comments below have devolved into pro- vs anti-spelling debate of most wondrous form, including at least one impromptu mini-poem.

dragged over from my art blog…

Been kind of slacking in the art department lately – working on bits and pieces of various stuff has been no problem, but actually finishing anything… yeah. I haven’t done anything traditional in a while, either. Forgot how much i love pen drawings.

So, for the Illustration Friday theme of ‘Renewal’ – a young woman ‘renewing’ herself by breaking the ties which have been holding her to a life she doesn’t like.

I sort-of tried to tie her into the Star card in the tarot, too, but almost everything i did along that line made her look worse instead of better… so i gave up pretty quick. It could still work as a Star card, i guess; the overall theme of freedom, hope, and inspiration is still there.

Semi-random tangent: i have been ridiculously obsessed with tarot art lately. I love seeing all the ways different artists have of interpreting the symbolism of the cards; i actually get really disappointed when i see a deck which has more to do with what the artist felt like doing than what the card normally symbolises. Okay, so tarot started out as, and in some countries still is, primarily just a card game; and while i don’t know the actual game rules i imagine the symbolism is pretty irrelevant – so it’s not like a deck which doesn’t join with the traditional symbolism is automatically useless or pointless.

Still, coming across such a deck while looking at more symbolic decks is like coming across a landscape at a portrait exhibit. There’s all these wonderful ways of depicting people; full bodies and faces and other body parts, active and passive, realistic and impressionistic and fauvist and abstract, and then, bam, there’s a sunset over a valley.

And it could be the most beautiful landscape in the world, there’s still going to be a what-the-hell-is-that-doing-here moment. Does it look like a person if you squint and tip your head sideways? Is it some sort of highbrow non-figurative portrait, where the colours represent the person’s aura and the environment represents eir birthplace and the buildings represent eir accomplishments? Is it just a really long-distance portrait and if you just look closely, you’ll see a tiny figure waving from the horizon?

Semi-random update on all my semi-random goals:

Novel!: it has Been Re-Outlined. If i’d written it properly i’d have already had a sense of what order everything happened in but hell, it was NaNoWriMo. There’s parts where i destroyed countries just to add words.
Next step is to go through and redesign the characters. Some are horribly, horribly unrealistic. Granted, the unrealistic ones are mainly minor characters, but they still need to get whipped into shape.

Tarot: I understand almost all the cards now (and the ones i don’t know i can guess fairly well), and know several spreads for reading purposes. Sweet. I learned in kind of an odd way so i’ll probably do a big long rambling 43things how-i-did-it style post at some point, once i have all the cards down.
I haven’t done any readings for anyone else yet (unless you count novel characters. They get tons of readings) – but i’d kind of like to read another real person at some point. I don’t think i’d ever want to be a professional reader but it’s definitely going to be a different experience. Certainly can’t do anyone in my strict Protestant family. Not without first giving big long explanations as to Why This Is Not Evil.

Yoga: I started up again on Saturday, with the YOGAmazing podcast. Saturday i just went with the longest episode dowloaded, figuring i’d work on it for twenty minutes and see how far i got. Erm, except the longest episode turned out to be a weight-loss one, ie ‘aerobics which happens to use yoga poses’, and my has-not-done-yoga-in-six-months body couldn’t keep up. The Yoga for Geeks episode is much more my speed :P And because it’s designed to be done at a desk anyway, i can actually watch it without having to set up some contorted system of balancing my iPod on a chair and craning my neck to be see whether i should be in down-dog or up-dog.

Dyeing hair blue: It’s… erm… turquoise. Dammit. And actually a really nice shade of turquoise, but not what i wanted.
Maybe, when my hair is back to its natural colour, i’ll try to dye it dark blue. Previous attempts turned out black but i have light blue hair dye now, so… maybe?
If that doesn’t work i’ll have to go to a stylist and have it Professionally Done.

random other stuff

• I love alternative-goal-setting strategies. Already mentioned David Turnbull’s design-a-perfect-day post, but since then i’ve also found Donald Miller’s post on writing your goals out as a story (i’ve heard ‘imagine your goal already done’ before, and ‘find a way to force yourself to accomplish it’ before, but put in the sense of climactic scenes and inciting incidents it sounds cooler.)
  And while it’s not really ‘alternative goal-setting’ in the strictest sense, Naomi Dunford’s unstupid goals post is good too. In summation: if it is a stupid goal you’re more likely to not bother and then feel emo-low-self-esteem-bad about not accomplishing the stupid than you are to awesomely do it.
• There’s also the awesome goal of reading a book a week, which averages out to forty pages a day, something most people can knock out during a coffee break or two. This is something i really need to do, especially with fiction. I more or less quit reading fiction a while ago; i think in 2009 i read two Scott Sigler books and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and everything else was non-fiction. The truly bizarre bit is i’m currently reading Reading Like a Writer, which kind of requires reading fiction. And no, it wasn’t a gift; i paid good money for a book telling me special ways to read stuff i don’t normally read at all. Sigh.

Non-art-geeks may not already know about this, but every year around this time the major colour companies declare a ‘colour of the year’ (ie, Pantone has declared 2010 to be a Turquoise year.)

Of course, experts can’t even discuss straight data without arguments cropping up over interpretation of said data. Experts announcing a colour naturally ends with all the colour nerds playing with entirely different colours.

Can the leading color authorities really forecast a color trend anyway? I mean, if you’re the most influential voice in a field and you forecast something… You’re not really forecasting, you’re telling people what they want. We don’t think people want to be told what they want. We want you to tell us what you want.
Announcing a single color to represent the entire year is a lot like announcing a single song to represent the entire year. Yes, there will be a clear top grossing or breakout song of 2010, but that song can’t really speak for every person. Nor can a single color. BUT, every person can speak for their own color of 2010… and that’s what we want you to do.
- COLOURlovers

So COLOURlovers (…and actually probably a few other colour-sites, too, though COLOURlovers is the only one i visit often…) set up a choose-it-yourself Colour of the Year page. Right now the most popular is Hope for Tomorrow Orange – my year, however, is shaping up to be more As a Kid Yellow.

I love it. Yellow’s not my favourite colour, but it matches my plans for the upcoming year so perfectly. Blue is too mellow, pink is too gentle, hot pinks and reds are just all wrong. Yellow is ‘i have the energy to edit this novel’. Yellow is ‘i can do anything and what i don’t know how to do, i can learn’. Yellow is flying-wild enthusiasm and excitement. Yellow is so totally my 2010.

And the person who originally named this particular shade on COLOURlovers called it ‘As a Kid’. It really doesn’t get any more perfect than that.

random other stuff…

• What No One Will Tell You About the New Year – makes the quite accurate point of ‘the shift from December 31st to January 1st is no different than June 17th to the 18th’ (better known as ‘you’re the same person now as you were in 2009 and just pretending something magical will happen at midnight won’t make it so.’) Not to discourage New Year’s resolutions… just pointing out they won’t necessarily turn out better than resolutions any other time of the year. Though there is some mental boost to starting something precisely on calendar dates, as anyone who has stayed up all Halloween night to start novelling exactly at midnight on the first of November can attest…
• On the subject of resolutions, designing and working towards a perfect average day is possibly one of the best. Also a semi-sneaky way of working any resolution you want to stick to regularly into a broader goal.
• Gretchen Rubin is doing a Year of Happiness challenge, with a different focus every month. (She’s also written a book on happiness, which comes out… erm, today.)