NaWimMoFom or something like that
Was discussing November Novel Month (or whatever the hell it's officially known as) with meitachi, and apparently that would require 1,700 or so words a day. 1,900 or so now, given that it's already a couple of days in. Anyways, a grand total of 50,000 words. Which is a hell of a lot.
However, I did find the idea amusing, so, with a little inspiration by the very odd (self-proclaimed) novel Vanishing Point by David Markson, I sat down and wrote whatever the hell came to my mind. Or whatever I could remember of my thoughts while in the middle of composing a sentence about a completely different topic.
But really, I thought, if all of these random authors can publish stuff like the content of two shoeboxes worth of mixed up 3'x5' index cards, then I can just talk about whatever I felt like and declare it a profound discovery of myself and/or human nature. Also long as there is some sort of implied change in my mental relationship with the world or so. Yep, and here went nothing:
Is it a great failing or an admirable quality to have so many interests, with only so little interest and ability to put into each? An admirable achievement? That’s not exactly right because no spectacular achievement has yet been reached in any particular area of interest. Professional dabblers get nothing for the small pains they suffer. Take all of that pain and sum it up and you get absolutely nothing except some trinkets and a lot of wasted time.
My fingernail, the one on my right hand ring finger, is really irritating me right now. Strangely enough, I don’t use it for much. Perhaps that’s why it’s hurting; lack of use makes it oversensitive. I must admit that there’s a certain satisfaction in pressing it and feeling tingle a bit. It’s almost like it’s reacting and snapping angrily at me for bothering it.
What is genius, in the end? If you don’t get dismissed as a lunatic or a blasphemer, you might get some recognition. If you’re truly fortunate, that recognition will be from people other than the twenty or so people in your field of specialization, and, who knows, you might even get some fame. Then, centuries after your death, which if you’re lucky will be horrific or at least mildly entertaining (if by great misfortune your death is neither the former nor the latter, it should at least be of a sexually transmitted disease of some sort), you might be remembered by a few history buffs and people who have inherited whatever was your field of expertise. Maybe they’ll even have some obscure algorithm, law, or statement ascribed to your name. But that’s it. Oh, and you’ll probably have some articles somewhere decrying you or declaring that clearly you were a drug addict, a homosexual, a homophobe, a neurotic dentist, a hermaphrodite, a manic depressive, a figment of someone’s imagination, or some combination thereof.
Is it just an urban myth that people of different cultures/environments perceive color differently? What would happen if someone were raised in a purely achromatic environment? That would be extremely difficult to carry out, but the results certainly would be interesting. Not that many people would know about it, unless it were announced or broadcasted via mass media. The vast amount of knowledge accrued by mankind is simply amazing, but the amount of that knowledge accessible, understandable, and/or known by any specific individual is depressingly tiny in comparison. Consider how much information is lost each time an inspired individual passes away. However, that must be in some way balanced by the birth of another inspired individual. So, perhaps, not counting the amount of information that managed to be passed on or written down, the total amount of original knowledge and thoughts from the earliest humans with enough imaginative and thinking capabilities is about the same as that of human society now. Discounting the major differences in population size, of course.
So other subtracting the facts and ideas that have been feed to me ever since I was a baby, what do I really know? Are we counting language? While young children can potentially create their own language, it would be too harsh to count language as entirely a matter of passed on information. Language, in its most basic usage and form, is a means of communication and a matter of instinct, I feel. After a certain number of vocabulary words, though, it most likely crosses the boundary of and enters into the realm of gathered knowledge. It’s also very interesting to think of the knowledge accumulated and passed on about matters that humans have created themselves. Perhaps that is the principle difference between the hard sciences and the humanities. Science, at least in its most basic form, is out to discover, take apart, and put back together the universe that already was. The humanities, as is evident in the name, seek to study and create more of the baggage of knowledge that is distinctively human.
I really do need to learn to use more words. Repetition grates on my nerves, and using the thesaurus feels like a means of intellectually cheating myself. Spell-check also feels like I’m letting my intelligence down easy. It’s remarkable how many words I can’t spell correctly, though. And the tiny grammar problems I have. One that always bothered me was whether or not commas should be used with the world “though,” especially when it’s at the end of a sentence. Technically it’s being used as an interjection but not a particularly strong one, so I’ve always been very torn apart over that matter. It causes me great anxiety, at times. Then again, as I learned in Linguistics class, language is very much a fluid and dynamic thing, so it can and inevitable does change as time goes on and words are altered by daily use. We certainly don’t speak the same language the same way that it was used a long time ago. Were we still going by eighteenth century standards, I would be using far more semicolons and far fewer periods.
I am a big fan of parallel structure though; I hope that that is one standard that never dies out. It’s not as widely used as it should be, as was made obvious by the constant harping of my high school English teachers. Well, perhaps the harping was not exactly constant, but there was at least some exhortation to use parallel structure. We should really advertise it on the daily news, on those streaming live news feeds at the bottom of the screen: FLASH FLOODS OVERWHELM LEVIES IN BANGLADESH* DOW JONES +50 AT MARKET CLOSE* APPLES MAY AFFECT ASTHMA IN YOUNG CHILDREN, EXPERTS SAY* PARALLEL STRUCTURE IS GOOD FOR YOUR SOUL, GRAMMAR FIENDS SAY.
Upon examining my fingernail that was rather sensitive, I’ve noticed that it’s also longer than my other fingernails. Perhaps this also accounts for its minor irritation, at least in part. Actually, my pinky fingernail is about the same length. However, its smaller width causes increased curvature, which in turn means that I am less likely to push another fingernail underneath it and push. Most likely, my fingernail just felt odd because I was messing with it in order to investigate the unusual sensations I was experiencing from it.
*Epiphany reached, writing is concluded*
Or, actually, i got to 1050 words, and completely lost my will to write. Haha, this is why I don't write (other than the fact that I'm rather bad at it). To all the people around the world agonizing over their tens of thousands of words left, good luck to you, your sanity, and your fingers. But really, I rather admire them for being able to write so much, and some of them might actually have a point or a plot of some sort. :O It's ridiculous the sort of people who exist. Maybe they were fed contaminated yak's milk as young children and now write to...satisfy a craving that they will never escape? Not to say anything bad of people who drink yak's milk.
Really, I should never be a writer. :D Not of fiction at least.
Well, that's all. I hope everyone else's life is going well.
However, I did find the idea amusing, so, with a little inspiration by the very odd (self-proclaimed) novel Vanishing Point by David Markson, I sat down and wrote whatever the hell came to my mind. Or whatever I could remember of my thoughts while in the middle of composing a sentence about a completely different topic.
But really, I thought, if all of these random authors can publish stuff like the content of two shoeboxes worth of mixed up 3'x5' index cards, then I can just talk about whatever I felt like and declare it a profound discovery of myself and/or human nature. Also long as there is some sort of implied change in my mental relationship with the world or so. Yep, and here went nothing:
Is it a great failing or an admirable quality to have so many interests, with only so little interest and ability to put into each? An admirable achievement? That’s not exactly right because no spectacular achievement has yet been reached in any particular area of interest. Professional dabblers get nothing for the small pains they suffer. Take all of that pain and sum it up and you get absolutely nothing except some trinkets and a lot of wasted time.
My fingernail, the one on my right hand ring finger, is really irritating me right now. Strangely enough, I don’t use it for much. Perhaps that’s why it’s hurting; lack of use makes it oversensitive. I must admit that there’s a certain satisfaction in pressing it and feeling tingle a bit. It’s almost like it’s reacting and snapping angrily at me for bothering it.
What is genius, in the end? If you don’t get dismissed as a lunatic or a blasphemer, you might get some recognition. If you’re truly fortunate, that recognition will be from people other than the twenty or so people in your field of specialization, and, who knows, you might even get some fame. Then, centuries after your death, which if you’re lucky will be horrific or at least mildly entertaining (if by great misfortune your death is neither the former nor the latter, it should at least be of a sexually transmitted disease of some sort), you might be remembered by a few history buffs and people who have inherited whatever was your field of expertise. Maybe they’ll even have some obscure algorithm, law, or statement ascribed to your name. But that’s it. Oh, and you’ll probably have some articles somewhere decrying you or declaring that clearly you were a drug addict, a homosexual, a homophobe, a neurotic dentist, a hermaphrodite, a manic depressive, a figment of someone’s imagination, or some combination thereof.
Is it just an urban myth that people of different cultures/environments perceive color differently? What would happen if someone were raised in a purely achromatic environment? That would be extremely difficult to carry out, but the results certainly would be interesting. Not that many people would know about it, unless it were announced or broadcasted via mass media. The vast amount of knowledge accrued by mankind is simply amazing, but the amount of that knowledge accessible, understandable, and/or known by any specific individual is depressingly tiny in comparison. Consider how much information is lost each time an inspired individual passes away. However, that must be in some way balanced by the birth of another inspired individual. So, perhaps, not counting the amount of information that managed to be passed on or written down, the total amount of original knowledge and thoughts from the earliest humans with enough imaginative and thinking capabilities is about the same as that of human society now. Discounting the major differences in population size, of course.
So other subtracting the facts and ideas that have been feed to me ever since I was a baby, what do I really know? Are we counting language? While young children can potentially create their own language, it would be too harsh to count language as entirely a matter of passed on information. Language, in its most basic usage and form, is a means of communication and a matter of instinct, I feel. After a certain number of vocabulary words, though, it most likely crosses the boundary of and enters into the realm of gathered knowledge. It’s also very interesting to think of the knowledge accumulated and passed on about matters that humans have created themselves. Perhaps that is the principle difference between the hard sciences and the humanities. Science, at least in its most basic form, is out to discover, take apart, and put back together the universe that already was. The humanities, as is evident in the name, seek to study and create more of the baggage of knowledge that is distinctively human.
I really do need to learn to use more words. Repetition grates on my nerves, and using the thesaurus feels like a means of intellectually cheating myself. Spell-check also feels like I’m letting my intelligence down easy. It’s remarkable how many words I can’t spell correctly, though. And the tiny grammar problems I have. One that always bothered me was whether or not commas should be used with the world “though,” especially when it’s at the end of a sentence. Technically it’s being used as an interjection but not a particularly strong one, so I’ve always been very torn apart over that matter. It causes me great anxiety, at times. Then again, as I learned in Linguistics class, language is very much a fluid and dynamic thing, so it can and inevitable does change as time goes on and words are altered by daily use. We certainly don’t speak the same language the same way that it was used a long time ago. Were we still going by eighteenth century standards, I would be using far more semicolons and far fewer periods.
I am a big fan of parallel structure though; I hope that that is one standard that never dies out. It’s not as widely used as it should be, as was made obvious by the constant harping of my high school English teachers. Well, perhaps the harping was not exactly constant, but there was at least some exhortation to use parallel structure. We should really advertise it on the daily news, on those streaming live news feeds at the bottom of the screen: FLASH FLOODS OVERWHELM LEVIES IN BANGLADESH* DOW JONES +50 AT MARKET CLOSE* APPLES MAY AFFECT ASTHMA IN YOUNG CHILDREN, EXPERTS SAY* PARALLEL STRUCTURE IS GOOD FOR YOUR SOUL, GRAMMAR FIENDS SAY.
Upon examining my fingernail that was rather sensitive, I’ve noticed that it’s also longer than my other fingernails. Perhaps this also accounts for its minor irritation, at least in part. Actually, my pinky fingernail is about the same length. However, its smaller width causes increased curvature, which in turn means that I am less likely to push another fingernail underneath it and push. Most likely, my fingernail just felt odd because I was messing with it in order to investigate the unusual sensations I was experiencing from it.
*Epiphany reached, writing is concluded*
Or, actually, i got to 1050 words, and completely lost my will to write. Haha, this is why I don't write (other than the fact that I'm rather bad at it). To all the people around the world agonizing over their tens of thousands of words left, good luck to you, your sanity, and your fingers. But really, I rather admire them for being able to write so much, and some of them might actually have a point or a plot of some sort. :O It's ridiculous the sort of people who exist. Maybe they were fed contaminated yak's milk as young children and now write to...satisfy a craving that they will never escape? Not to say anything bad of people who drink yak's milk.
Really, I should never be a writer. :D Not of fiction at least.
Well, that's all. I hope everyone else's life is going well.