The Ravings: February 22, 2010 - Feeling Old
You know. The main reason I can't write fiction right now is I can't step outside of myself quite so easily anymore. I don't entirely understand why, but I've gone from very obliquely writing about myself and parts of myself to... being unable to keep the whole of me from the page.
That disappoints me.
I also can't draw pictures with words quite as well anymore. Mostly because I'm out of practice and haven't done it seriously for years upon years. My style has changed to take on too much of my everyday voice; I write fluidly here, on my journal, because I'm actually speaking in my head the whole time.
When I imagine snippets of dialogue, it's more and more frequently just a conversation I'm having with myself inside my head than it is a chatter between two characters.
This would be fine if I were writing my Great Novel thing. That's very explicitly a statement of my philosophy (sorry baeraad) and I don't mind writing as poorly as Ayn Rand did for that.
But this isn't. The stuff I'm trying to write is just little bits of ideas trying to become stories but not quite making it.
I'm not a storyteller. I never have been. I'm a writer, not an author.
I wonder if I should just accept that. I've tried so hard to be a creator over the past ten years, and I've failed so hard and so much, that maybe it really is time to give up. I've failed as an entrepreneur, what, four times? I've failed to finish any of my major coding projects, about ten to fifteen of them. I've failed to get a serious start on my novels. I've failed to mastermind any number of *cough* clandestine operations. Um, we don't talk about those.
The only thing I'm not willing to say I "failed to finish" is my philosophy, because that keeps chugging along semi-regularly. I mean, sure. I gave up on it in 2007 when I gave away my book on monogamy. But I came back, three times now, and it's still moving. I'm stalled at the present, but that's more because I'm being pelted and I'm not coping all that well.
And the Aqualgidus Papers are doing okay. I may scrap the partitions and turn it into something a lot shorter, but that's a maturation of the philosophy, not a compromise. And those have always been my intended legacy, minus the direct impacts I've made on the world. I always hoped that they would be a required reading for entrance to my university.
*rubs head* Tired.
My philosophy.
There are three distinct components. The partitions. There's the small-scale social dynamics and its macroscopic implications: the questions about love and friendship and how people relate to one another and how groups work and how connections shift around and networks grow. That was WHAN, or "I will always love you."
There's the future-oriented mental practice, of divining clarity, of the nature of dreams, of impacting the world. It was about a general attitude of good will and the power that can be wielded by a stilled mind as it shatters boundaries and breaks barriers. That was Aqualgidus, the crystallization.
And there's the general regard of chaos and incomprehensibility and uncertainty and the fullness of life's gigantic fuck-all whimsical tempestuous tossing a fellow about. It was about perspective and the really, really long view, about how to manuever yourself into the eye of the hurricane and be that calm rock in the midst of the crashing torrents, about how to surf the tsunami and how to outlast any storm. That was the Eye of the Tempest, and it was a shitty name, but a good one.
I mean, I take this view. In my eyes, everyone alive now is already dead. Everyone who will be born in the next hundred years is dead. When I lookwhen I really lookI'm operating at a millenial scale. I'm throwing down plans that are meant to truly take shape in five hundred, five thousand years. I have never expected to live to see myself vindicated. I have some small idea of how my plans fail in fifty thousand years. And this perspective is easy for me. I flip it on sometimes when I'm bored, and work on figuring out some of those subtle ripples across space and time.
You. Asshole reading my journal five thousand years from now on Mars.
Go away. Show it to your wife. Your mohawk makes you look stupid. It's a mohawk. Look it up!
If I were feeling really arrogant, I'd claim that "Eye of the Tempest" was inspired by Shakespeare or Gaiman, but no. I hadn't heard of the play when I came up with that name. I've just been obsessed by cyclones for a long time.
I don't really take the long view very often, because it's not actually useful for someone as time-bound as this mortal clay. I gave up useless philosophy when I gave up eschatology and stopped being death-obsessed. So most of my stuff stands a reasonable chance of being immediately useful in immediate lives, and I implement it in my own life. That's dogfooding, right? Poor dogs.
I do find it useful to be able to take the long view on occasion. It makes it easy to laugh at the absurdity of some things, and gives greater gravity and pause to others. If it makes sense in the moment, for instance, I always favor helping children to absolutely anything else I could be doing. Yes, they're also dead in the millenial scale I talk about, but impacting a child is worth perhaps five times any other action a person can take. Most of the big achievements of society are fired by one person or small groups, sure, but they're undergirded by legions of individuals and those individuals were all children. Every tiny pebble in that vast ocean cascades. Children have more time, and so your contribution has more time to spread when it goes through them.
It's a gamble, of course. The actual action is tiny, though they add up, and there's no guarantee you're actually at the fulcrum or even pushing in the right direction. But there's some law of large numbers at work here. And it's always the little things that end up counting the most. Which child doesn't matter. Just pick one. Or a couple thousand. That's also a gamble. You might get lucky. I did. =P
I was reading about the way people develop out of adversity today; that was the whole parenting thing. And it occurred to me that I'm mildly superhuman about the way I handle adversity--not out of some extraordinary competence or intelligence or anything--but because I'm immersed in it in ways so thorough that I think most people would be pretty surprised to discover (if you haven't been reading here!).
I mean, I'm always kinda hurting anyways, so sharp pains from getting sliced or bruised are more annoyances and distractions than, well... pain. I'm still kinda curious how I'd deal with amputation or fracture. And I'm curious about what it's like to go into shock. Fatigue sloughs off me whenever I feel there's something I need or want to do. I apparently hallucinate sometimes when I'm really tired, or I have um... engaging.. dreams. But when there's a problem to solve, my mind usually snaps together and I'm at at least 80%. The last time I was bedridden was when I got my wisdom teeth pulled, and I was down because of the damn sedative. Oh, and the blood. ^_^ And sickness is something I laugh at the prospect of. I mostly worry about being a carrier; I regularly beat down illness in less than 24 hours, fluids, system flush, and sleep. At worst I have a headache.
Headaches are my kryptonite. I used to say that I exist by the power of my will, but that headaches were a backlash against this. Which is kinda true; headaches make me phase out of existence a little. It's like... oh, your concentration slipped? Okay, you just drifted out of spacetime. Sorry, yo. Where's that damn silver cord connected to my body, anyways?
Mm. That's mostly what I am. I survive. I sort of squint at brick walls, walk through them, and try to dust myself off but don't really do a very good job. So I'm just covered in brick shit, which is like bird shit, except you don't have the bragging rights of having been targeted by aerial bombardment; it's your own damn fault you went through that wall, hey?
...
Oh dear. It's Theme to Neverending Story next on the playlist. I think this is still my favorite song of all time. Lines that keep their secrets / will unfold behind the clouds / and there upon the rainbow / is the answer to a neverending story. *hums*
What the hell is next? At the Beginning? What is this, middle school? ... *pulls it up*
I think I'm done with this entry.
No one told me / I was going to find you. / Unexpected, what you did to my heart.
I'll be there when the world stops turning. / I'll be there when the storm is through.
*spins*
The best part of flying is not the speed.
It's the barrel rolls. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Turning, turning, turning. Oh hey, we're in Les Mis now.
I <3 Hai Phan: http://haikai.net/archive.html
Yeah, I know that "One Last Goodbye" would have been a better picture, but I don't have my colored version. =/ I'll get around to redoing that sometime this summer, for Kat.
That disappoints me.
I also can't draw pictures with words quite as well anymore. Mostly because I'm out of practice and haven't done it seriously for years upon years. My style has changed to take on too much of my everyday voice; I write fluidly here, on my journal, because I'm actually speaking in my head the whole time.
When I imagine snippets of dialogue, it's more and more frequently just a conversation I'm having with myself inside my head than it is a chatter between two characters.
This would be fine if I were writing my Great Novel thing. That's very explicitly a statement of my philosophy (sorry baeraad) and I don't mind writing as poorly as Ayn Rand did for that.
But this isn't. The stuff I'm trying to write is just little bits of ideas trying to become stories but not quite making it.
I'm not a storyteller. I never have been. I'm a writer, not an author.
I wonder if I should just accept that. I've tried so hard to be a creator over the past ten years, and I've failed so hard and so much, that maybe it really is time to give up. I've failed as an entrepreneur, what, four times? I've failed to finish any of my major coding projects, about ten to fifteen of them. I've failed to get a serious start on my novels. I've failed to mastermind any number of *cough* clandestine operations. Um, we don't talk about those.
The only thing I'm not willing to say I "failed to finish" is my philosophy, because that keeps chugging along semi-regularly. I mean, sure. I gave up on it in 2007 when I gave away my book on monogamy. But I came back, three times now, and it's still moving. I'm stalled at the present, but that's more because I'm being pelted and I'm not coping all that well.
And the Aqualgidus Papers are doing okay. I may scrap the partitions and turn it into something a lot shorter, but that's a maturation of the philosophy, not a compromise. And those have always been my intended legacy, minus the direct impacts I've made on the world. I always hoped that they would be a required reading for entrance to my university.
*rubs head* Tired.
My philosophy.
There are three distinct components. The partitions. There's the small-scale social dynamics and its macroscopic implications: the questions about love and friendship and how people relate to one another and how groups work and how connections shift around and networks grow. That was WHAN, or "I will always love you."
There's the future-oriented mental practice, of divining clarity, of the nature of dreams, of impacting the world. It was about a general attitude of good will and the power that can be wielded by a stilled mind as it shatters boundaries and breaks barriers. That was Aqualgidus, the crystallization.
And there's the general regard of chaos and incomprehensibility and uncertainty and the fullness of life's gigantic fuck-all whimsical tempestuous tossing a fellow about. It was about perspective and the really, really long view, about how to manuever yourself into the eye of the hurricane and be that calm rock in the midst of the crashing torrents, about how to surf the tsunami and how to outlast any storm. That was the Eye of the Tempest, and it was a shitty name, but a good one.
I mean, I take this view. In my eyes, everyone alive now is already dead. Everyone who will be born in the next hundred years is dead. When I lookwhen I really lookI'm operating at a millenial scale. I'm throwing down plans that are meant to truly take shape in five hundred, five thousand years. I have never expected to live to see myself vindicated. I have some small idea of how my plans fail in fifty thousand years. And this perspective is easy for me. I flip it on sometimes when I'm bored, and work on figuring out some of those subtle ripples across space and time.
You. Asshole reading my journal five thousand years from now on Mars.
Go away. Show it to your wife. Your mohawk makes you look stupid. It's a mohawk. Look it up!
If I were feeling really arrogant, I'd claim that "Eye of the Tempest" was inspired by Shakespeare or Gaiman, but no. I hadn't heard of the play when I came up with that name. I've just been obsessed by cyclones for a long time.
I don't really take the long view very often, because it's not actually useful for someone as time-bound as this mortal clay. I gave up useless philosophy when I gave up eschatology and stopped being death-obsessed. So most of my stuff stands a reasonable chance of being immediately useful in immediate lives, and I implement it in my own life. That's dogfooding, right? Poor dogs.
I do find it useful to be able to take the long view on occasion. It makes it easy to laugh at the absurdity of some things, and gives greater gravity and pause to others. If it makes sense in the moment, for instance, I always favor helping children to absolutely anything else I could be doing. Yes, they're also dead in the millenial scale I talk about, but impacting a child is worth perhaps five times any other action a person can take. Most of the big achievements of society are fired by one person or small groups, sure, but they're undergirded by legions of individuals and those individuals were all children. Every tiny pebble in that vast ocean cascades. Children have more time, and so your contribution has more time to spread when it goes through them.
It's a gamble, of course. The actual action is tiny, though they add up, and there's no guarantee you're actually at the fulcrum or even pushing in the right direction. But there's some law of large numbers at work here. And it's always the little things that end up counting the most. Which child doesn't matter. Just pick one. Or a couple thousand. That's also a gamble. You might get lucky. I did. =P
I was reading about the way people develop out of adversity today; that was the whole parenting thing. And it occurred to me that I'm mildly superhuman about the way I handle adversity--not out of some extraordinary competence or intelligence or anything--but because I'm immersed in it in ways so thorough that I think most people would be pretty surprised to discover (if you haven't been reading here!).
I mean, I'm always kinda hurting anyways, so sharp pains from getting sliced or bruised are more annoyances and distractions than, well... pain. I'm still kinda curious how I'd deal with amputation or fracture. And I'm curious about what it's like to go into shock. Fatigue sloughs off me whenever I feel there's something I need or want to do. I apparently hallucinate sometimes when I'm really tired, or I have um... engaging.. dreams. But when there's a problem to solve, my mind usually snaps together and I'm at at least 80%. The last time I was bedridden was when I got my wisdom teeth pulled, and I was down because of the damn sedative. Oh, and the blood. ^_^ And sickness is something I laugh at the prospect of. I mostly worry about being a carrier; I regularly beat down illness in less than 24 hours, fluids, system flush, and sleep. At worst I have a headache.
Headaches are my kryptonite. I used to say that I exist by the power of my will, but that headaches were a backlash against this. Which is kinda true; headaches make me phase out of existence a little. It's like... oh, your concentration slipped? Okay, you just drifted out of spacetime. Sorry, yo. Where's that damn silver cord connected to my body, anyways?
Mm. That's mostly what I am. I survive. I sort of squint at brick walls, walk through them, and try to dust myself off but don't really do a very good job. So I'm just covered in brick shit, which is like bird shit, except you don't have the bragging rights of having been targeted by aerial bombardment; it's your own damn fault you went through that wall, hey?
...
Oh dear. It's Theme to Neverending Story next on the playlist. I think this is still my favorite song of all time. Lines that keep their secrets / will unfold behind the clouds / and there upon the rainbow / is the answer to a neverending story. *hums*
What the hell is next? At the Beginning? What is this, middle school? ... *pulls it up*
I think I'm done with this entry.
No one told me / I was going to find you. / Unexpected, what you did to my heart.
I'll be there when the world stops turning. / I'll be there when the storm is through.
*spins*
The best part of flying is not the speed.
It's the barrel rolls. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Turning, turning, turning. Oh hey, we're in Les Mis now.
I <3 Hai Phan: http://haikai.net/archive.html
Yeah, I know that "One Last Goodbye" would have been a better picture, but I don't have my colored version. =/ I'll get around to redoing that sometime this summer, for Kat.