i am currently in school. i am waiting for a particular student who has a habit of not showing up for his session. if he does show up, he tends to be very late. i think, for this afternoon, i'm simply going to sign out of the google meet at the 15 minute mark. it's standard policy at the college level to simply leave the class if the professor doesn't show up after 15 minutes... why can't we apply the same standard to students?
things have been slower lately. i have been struggling to work through some of my routines, and i suppose at times that they have felt compulsory, rushed... like i'm just doing them for no particular reason. i also think that a few of the things that i try to do, particularly those that seem to be difficult... i have kind of backed off of them. for example, one of the things that i do is work on something from khan academy. currently, i'm trying to rewrite a memory game using javascript to incorporate a bunch of different features. the difficulty for me has been issues with functions that are called recursively by the program, even out of sequence. if something runs constantly, then how can you do something "before" it, or "after" it? i guess i'm more used to "old school" programming, where there is just one stream, and you can more or less control what gets done and when... in any case, i kind of backed off of this. i started to do other, lesser things, but a part of me couldn't help but feel that this was a cop-out.
i guess there is something important about finishing things. it has some sort of psychological effect. it confers a feeling of solidity to you. as long as you decide something in advance, like, i'm going to write 4 pages, and you do that- then you feel as though you have accomplished something. sure, those 4 pages could be pure shit, and they may not really progress the plot of your story very much... but they are 4 pages... i know that when neil gaiman talks about "finishing things," what he means is that you pursue things to their natural end, not some arbitrary mini-end points that you invent for your convenience. i'm not ready to do things to that extent... i mean, i have, and frankly, it used to stretch me so thin that i felt worn out and transparent. and the other issue is that i have so many other obligations... so to obsess over a single thing only left me incapable to function in the countless other dimensions of my life. so i had to apportion things, for both my sanity and my continued functioning. it was a compromise. a necessary one... sure, there may be miraculous works that i don't create, because i don't allow myself to relentlessly pursue my muse... but so what.
the funny thing is that i think my brain sort of likes this cyclical routine, and the pauses in between allow it to come up with ideas and solutions unprovoked. i think there is much to be said for the passive aspect of consciousness (otherwise known as the unconscious mind). we acknowledge its power, but in attempting to yoke it to service, we actually cause it to slip further and further out of reach. there's something to be said for ignoring things, forgetting things... because when we are no longer actively concerned and working on something, sometimes that's when the unconscious, like a shy voice, babbles out ideas into the ether...
for example, currently, with my kappa noodle story... i imagined a few other characters, notably someone called kappa-rate (supposed to be read like corporate), and maybe some sort of jokester called kappa-chino... they were supposed to be the new school kappa, different from yagoro... they were supposed to be a part of a global enterprise to find the "unwanteds" and turn them into the new army of kappa, who had as their goal the overthrow of the human race... yes, i had this idea in my head, but i wasn't sure how i wasn't going to execute it. largely this was due to the fact that i had a notion of a journey... something about how the main character was trying to find his way back to the surface world... but at the same time, i wanted there to be this internal tug-of-war... and that tug-of-war had to do with the feeling that my brother was worthy of hatred and destruction, or whether he ought to be forgiven. the latter is inconsistent with a "journey," in the sense that a journey progresses into new vistas, whereas a "tug-of-war" is a static situation... i also didn't know how kappa-rate and the others would fit in. were they antagonists? (well, actually, they were to be seen as antagonists in a certain sense, no matter what)... and how was i to present the memories? were they supposed to come out naturally in the course of the "journey?"
this morning, as i was doing my standing postures, it sort of came to me. i should turn it all into some sort of tribunal. that would allow me to incorporate a series of little vignettes/memories, without fear of dragging a journey. a tribunal is a tug-of-war, a matter of deciding guilt or innocence. and besides, it would parallel the events in the "five chinese brothers" story, which this is ostensibly an undermining of...
so, yeah. after this, according to my routine, i've got to write at least 4 pages in that story, so we'll see if i can execute it. but i think things are coming along, if not perfectly, well, at least they are coming along. and i suppose that's the best i can hope for...
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but, yes. lately, i'm cold. i'm tired. i'm not particularly excited. sure, there is hope on the horizon, but oh, what devastation we have seen in the interim! what betrayals of character! i was thinking of the term "faithless elector," and i think it's appropriate for our times. things only work if there is faith in things working. without that "faith," everything falls apart, and there is no sense in coming together for anything. there is only the nagging fear of betrayal, ad infinitum...
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okay, so i better get back to work. i'm going to clean up this room, and then make some deposits, work on editing my daughter's essays (she's applying to college- hard to believe), work on an iep, and then get down to the business of writing my 4 page assignment...
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