No Applause Please

One thing I'm getting really tired of hearing is the constant applause of people in the United States whenever someone they agree with speaks, or whenever someone says something patriotic. Maybe I'm just watching the wrong kind of television, but it's starting to get really annoying.

My main example is the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. At the beginning of every show, and before and after commercial breaks, the crowd cheers. Once upon a time, people cheered with "Rah" or "Hooray". Also hurrah, huzzah. Today, people almost universally as far as I have heard, cheer with "Woo!" If the men are cheering, it's in falsetto. And every once in a while in the audience of a show like the Daily Show, there's one person who just screams or shrieks above the rest:

"aaaaaaaaaaa!" (deep breath) "breeyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

Sometimes it sounds like the people in the audience are riding a roller coaster. Other times it sounds to me like the screams of the damned in hell. I get what the intent is, though, and that is that such a show is supposed to imitate a rock concert, in which the audience is intentionally whipped into a frenzy of emotion, and that's what people go to a rock concert to experience. But it's the screams of the damned that get to me, and I hope that people would start to imagine the tortured damned every time they hear a crowd screaming, and realize how ridiculous this is.

I've been emotional too, so I don't blame people for getting caught up in it. And when it's in a studio/arena setting, there's something thrilling about being in a mob, and all the time knowing that the environment is quite safe. What I don't really understand is why the content of the show should elicit such a response. Basically the audience of a rock concert or a television show are people with houses, families, and jobs, or at least they go to school. A rock concert becomes a mini-riot, the way these people are shrieking and carrying on, and they have no real reason to do it. The issues discussed on the Daily Show are not really worth freaking out so much about, and even if you do freak out in the audience, what are you really doing about the issue? Nothing. If anything, you're blowing off steam about real issues, and you leave that night with a feeling of accomplishment and catharsis. It is clearly and certainly artificial, but the psychological effect is that you feel as if you've done your part. And so you are less compelled to perform other acts in order to fix the things that you screamed about last night.

Of course, that is what the Daily Show is. It's part comedy, part rock concert, and just designed to make you feel good about yourself, so that you watch the advertisements and keep coming back for more. The issues discussed in the show are just designed to make you feel morally superior for watching this kind of show instead of something less edgy, whether it's news or entertainment.

But the problem is not just limited to the Daily Show, as I often see this kind of behavior in college or university settings, like when a school invites a celebrity pseudo-intellectual to speak or debate. Here the crowd is used to being entertained by rock stars, and then they're placed into this format where there's a serious debate going on. They act strangely, and they can either turn on the speaker or misconstrue his words in a strange, populist way.

In some ways, I'd prefer a crowd that says "Boo!" to a crowd that cheers. But the problem with that kind of crowd is that it contains no individuals. I guess what I want from a crowd is confusion. I want some people cheering, some people booing, and the majority thoughtfully contemplating. I guess that makes for a pretty boring performance.

It's such a strange phenomenon when someone goes against a crowd, so you hardly ever have a divided crowd that can simultaneously boo and cheer. When Lincoln said "a house divided against itself cannot stand," I imagine him saying it in the literal sense, in the sense of a theater house. I suppose there's an intentional irony in my using it in this sense, since Lincoln was killed in a theater.

A single heckler can disrupt the entire room; even if the whole room disagrees with him, chaos erupts, because other people might try to shout down the heckler. The entertainer has lots of tricks to drown out hecklers though, especially in a musical setting.

Christian children?

Richard Dawkins argues that children ought not to be labeled with their parents' faith until they are old enough to decide for themselves whether they want to be a part of that faith. Dawkins objects to a child, for example, being called a

Muslim boy
Muslim girl
Christian boy
Christian girl
Jewish boy
Jewish girl
Catholic boy
Catholic girl
Anglican boy
Anglican girl
Protestant boy
Protestant girl

It's fair enough, I'd say, when it comes to issues of belief. How can you tell a child, "because you are born into this family, you must believe that a man can come back from the dead." A reasonable person wouldn't say such a thing, but I'd have to say I don't necessarily object to it. I can see Dawkins' point here though. We are an enlightened society, and we privilege reason, empiricism, logic, and science. So it doesn't matter what our parents tell us in the course of the stories they read to us out of the Bible. Until they are tested scientifically, it is essentially meaningless to say "I believe this" or "I don't believe that."

So what we're left with, is children who say they believe something because it's a part of their identity, not because they have examined it and found it to be true or false.

It reminds me of the debate teams we had in school. Here's how my grade 11 English teacher handled the topic (in a British Columbia state secondary school). We would be given a controversial topic to debate; in one case it was abortion. Before the teacher split the class into two groups, he would ask for the class to put up their hands if they thought abortion was wrong.

"Put up your hand if you think abortion is wrong, and leave your hand up for a minute," he said. I don't know how it worked out so well, but just about exactly half the class was pro-life, and half the class was pro-choice. (30 kids in the class, 15 pro-life and 15 pro-choice or undecided.) My teacher then pointed to each student in turn, while the pro-lifers had their hands raised, and placed them into team 1 or team 2. He didn't say which team would be debating which side, but it became clear at the end of this exercise that most of the pro-lifers were in one group, while the other group was mostly pro-choicers. There was evidently some cross-over, which I assume was also deliberate. I think maybe you can see where I'm going with this, so you won't be surprised to learn that the teacher then assigned a side of the debate to each team. The pro-lifers were assigned the side of the debate that argued in favor of a mother's right to choose. The pro-choicers were assigned to argue that human life begins at conception and thus has rights that ought to be protected. As far as I know, no student protested. We all performed our assignments according to our academic proficiency or lack thereof. None of the students took the opportunity to parody the other side; everyone took the assignment seriously.

Now, we were probably old enough by that time to be considered adults, and those of us who were Christians could probably call ourselves Christians and not be objectionable to Richard Dawkins. But what this illustrates is the difference between being able to hold a belief and being able to evaluate it from an objective point of reference.

That covers the issue of belief, I think. By analogy, I'd say that calling a child a Christian child is the equivalent of putting them on the Christian side of the debate team before they have learned all the facts. Just like my teacher put half the class on the pro-choice side even though they might not have been informed of all the facts surrounding the issue, and they would have to do some reading in order to perform their debating duties. People can change their mind when they get older, and children can decide that they don't like the label they've been given, and change it.

It's not always the easiest thing for a person to do, to change their label and deny some of the things their parents believe, but it's pretty much always been a part of growing up, and even if it doesn't happen with regard to religion, it will at least happen with regard to some other facet of a person's life, which could include sexuality, politics, choice of career, or anything else.

Now, about Richard Dawkins' objection, the other thing I think he fails to mention are the rituals and prohibitions of religion. For one example, what about the Jewish or Muslim student in a school in Europe or America, who doesn't eat pork? How is this supposed to be explained? If children cannot be labeled as Christian or Muslim, then how does one go about explaining to the other students that little Muhammed can't have bacon? Or how does Muhammed explain it? If his parents have been good Muslim parents, then they have explained to him that "you are a Muslim, and we Muslims do not eat pork, and we pray five times a day . . ." etc. Any normal kid is going to say to his classmates "I am a Muslim, so I don't eat ham." And a typical teacher in the modern West is going to understand that Muslims and Jews don't eat pork, and that that's okay. Just don't give that particular kid a ham sandwich.

Problems will naturally arise if either the Muslims or the Christians start using terms like "filthy" to describe the others' eating habits. However, the solution is reasoned explanation and intervention by the teacher, who should explain to the students that "here at school, we don't call each other filthy, dirty, or smelly. Children of different religions have different habits."

Is my picture of the world too rosy? Is this too much to ask of teachers? Or is this too much to ask of teachers to ask of students?

See, I'm not in agreement with Richard Dawkins on his idea that children should not be labeled. I don't believe that it is possible to extinguish labels, and they're going to come up whether you want them to or not. And how hard is it to accept that children of different faiths have different customs and beliefs?

I guess in a way, I am nearer to Dawkins' ideal world. The world he rails against is a world in which even the teachers are complicit in the denigration of minority children. The world Dawkins wants to change is the world in which Christian prayer is mandated every morning, and children pray to Jesus, sing songs about Jesus, and are taught that the Bible is the best and only true book.

I'd actually agree with the latter statement, but I believe that what needs to be taught in schools is that there are other people in the world who have their own scriptures. And maybe the teacher believes that the Bible is the best one, but as a teacher, shklis job is to present the alternatives. After all, you can't know that the Bible is the best and most true book unless you are able to compare it to other examples. And anyways, school is not necessarily in the business of telling you what is best and most true, but of teaching you how to think and communicate using examples drawn from literature, religion, and culture, including both what is thought best and most true, and what is thought poor of, and why does there need to be a value judgment anyways, on a piece meant to illustrate a concept?

The Imbalance of Protest

This is a fairly new concept to me, since I'm only on the brink of possibly entering into an administrative or managerial role in some company or other.

Let's look at a protest from both points of view involved.

From the point of view of the authority, the people being disrupted, a protest is an inconvenience, an annoyance. And there are a couple of options you have, none of which involve a special level of effort.

If you are holding an event or a meeting, or some kind of ceremony, one of the things you can do is postpone it to a later date, or move it to a new location, away from the disrupting influence. This is effective because protesters, by definition, have less organizational resources than the "legitimate" authority. You can almost always out-organize protesters.

The other option you have is to remove the protesters, and you can do this in advance or on location. When I say you can remove the protesters, I'm not talking about activeness here, because you can call the police in to do this for you. You don't really have to lift a finger. The only problems that could arise are when your event becomes so large that it attracts such a large group of protesters, that the normal police force of your host community cannot effectively remove the protesters. You have to either hold it in a bigger community, or give the police advance warning, if you know that a protest is possible or likely.

So when a protest happens, you are justifiably annoyed, but it might as well be like calling a ball game on account of rain. It might as well be as if someone forgot some key paperwork, and you have to reconvene at a later date.

Now, to switch things around, we can begin to look at things from the point of view of the protesters. To a protester, a protest is a big deal. To some of them, it means the world, and they are willing to possibly be arrested for their protest. A protester's whole life is put on hold by a protest, and their entire psychology is based in whatever issue they are protesting. To them, nothing else matters. They also tend to perceive their effect as rather large. To them, a victory is to make the rich and powerful, the decision-makers to take notice.

Unfortunately, many protests don't even get that much attention from the powerful. The protesters' only allies are the media. The media are able to make a story out of "we managed to annoy this big corporation/this government."

So for the protester, it is a matter of life and death, but for the authority, it's merely an inconvenience. Often though, the authority is willing to dignify the protest with indignation that it probably doesn't really deserve. I was walking along the sidewalk the other day, and it was flooded with ice-melt. I felt a burning anger in my heart at the inconvenience of having to go a few feet out of my way, and if there had been someone to lash out at, I would have. Authorities tend to do this with minor inconveniences like having to reschedule meetings. This is because it is the bureaucratic mentality that any little change in procedure is unthinkable, unacceptable, and needs to be corrected, loudly. Possibly with police intervention. But these bureaucrats are going to go to sleep in their own homes that night, wake up with the same job the next day, and get pissed off to the same degree that the photocopier still isn't working. They'll deal with it.

The protesters won't necessarily deal. They might wake up in jail. They might lose their jobs. They certainly don't have a corporate juggernaut to keep them rolling along in their fight against the system. They have the media, but the media can only do so much, and (as I've mentioned before) the media cannot be trusted. Not by the protesters, not by the powerful, and not by the consumers. The protesters are the ultimate underdogs in any such contest.

There Are No Accidents in Poetry

There are no accidents in poetry.

I'd say this goes all the way back to the book of Job, whenever that was written. In the book of Job, all kinds of bad things happen to Job, and as far as he knows, there's no reason for them. But it takes the whole book for him to realize this. Each of the speeches of his friends seems to posit a reasonable explanation for what has befallen him.

I recently read a poem by a fellow student, and in this poem, what happens is a woman does a strip-tease in a hotel room, throws an article of clothing on top of a lamp, it catches on fire, and it burns the apartment up, including her. An accident, right?

As the title of this post suggests, there are no accidents in poetry. I could equally say that there are no accidents in dreams. There are no accidents in fantasies. There are no accidents in daydreams. There are no accidents in wishing.

That is to say, if something happens in a poem, it is because some part of the poet wished for it to happen. Shall I add murder to the list of crimes of poets? I think I might, especially when there is no poetic justification for the death. (Incidentally, I have been guilty of destroying the entire world in a poem, just for the sake of destruction.)

Tragic loss plays a few key roles in poetry and fiction. Often, it is something for the protagonist and other characters to rail against. "My friend is dead! Why did God/the universe inflict this on me?" Other times it is a lesson for the reader to avoid circumstances. "Oh he knew that if he ate the fruit of the Tree of Certain Death that he would die! And so he has! Alas, but we cannot grieve, for the universe is just! It rewards stupidity with pain, and immorality with vengeance!"

I guess my problem with the poet as murderer is that sometimes the poet sends the wrong message with the death of a character. My friend's poem is an example of this, I think. We are given very few details of the dancer, except a few about what her lifestyle might have been like, the fact that she's in a hotel, the fact that she's willing to do a striptease, and we begin to get the picture that some folks might consider that she's almost deserving of a fate approximating what she got. It was her who threw the camisole on the lamp, after all. She accidentally killed herself.

And yet, there are no accidents in poetry. The lesson in the poem is that the dancer has transgressed against the law of the universe, and the universe has seen fit to extinguish her.

So, if I had the chance, I would re-write the poem, and include enough details to take the blame off the dancer. I would make her more like Job, even though she might still have a lifestyle filled with drugs, sex, and lies. I would be left with a very different portrait of a person, I suppose. But the fact is, I don't believe that anyone deserves to die. The closest I could get would be that those who deliberately commit suicide might deserve it, and yet I can't quite bring myself even to that point.

The problem with my friend's poem is that it is almost comical. The reader is almost brought to laugh at the self-inflicted plight of this pathetic, worthless creature. We're not sorry to see her go. We cheer the flames on. And no, I don't think this idea is coming from within me. I think it is implicit in the work of art whenever a person dies accidentally by their own hand, in a poem or work of fiction.

Poem in Progress

The following is a rough extract from a poem I'm working on as part of a larger project for my creative writing project. I imagine it will look quite different when it is done, and it will be a lot longer. I post it here merely as an example of the kind of work I'm trying to take seriously at the moment, since most of what this blog is is a break from seriousness, and a place to put things that I don't really care about. I'm sort of going against that in this post, but not really, because this poem is by no means complete, nor am I entirely certain whether it will end up in the final compilation. Anyways, might as well give you the poem.

In one dream, we explored the sea,
played in its shallows, scoured its depths
Humbobs, makers of ropes
designed fleets of fortresses
so big that we could cover the edge of the world
just like the entrances of our houseboats.
Young jorns climbed the ropes
up into the sun and down into the abyss
We ate the airy fruit, swallowed the dense bread,
and danced to the scrolls of all-is-oneness.
Six vectors belonged to the kings of us
but scant record of the seventh remains.

Now we are a valley people,
though we still wander, the seventh vector is our anchor.
I don’t know if we ever had hearts
when we were being born in the sea.
And the entrance to the abyss is not known,
even though the Scurbdads strung their guidestrings.
The leading twines are cut, the supporting lines are tangled,
and we don’t know the way to heaven or hell.
We call out in the voices of birds,
and we have learned how the echoes answer:
“Go back. I am a solid wall.”
“Turn around. I’m just the ground.”

Commas and Poetry

I think commas have been very lucky in today's poetry. It seems that other punctuation has been either abandoned or severely reduced. Yet the comma remains.

The period is often omitted due to its ominous finality. Language with periods is neither nuanced nor particularly intelligent. Language with commas is open to interpretation. Language with commas can hold multiple ideas in the same thought. We don't often speak out loud in periods anymore.

Capitalization has also received a major blow in that it is no longer really quite comfortable to include capital letters in a familiar or politically undersurging poetry. Language with capital letters almost seems authoritarian. Language without them is inviting the reader to decide which words are the most important. The little I is indicative of a non-threatening author. An entire line of little letters is aesthetically more pleasing than a line with the occasional mutant capital.

On the internet a string of all capital letters indicate shouting. By the inverse logic a passage neglecting to capitalize anything could almost be construed as a whisper.

If You Should Stumble Upon This Blog Accidentally

Up until now, I have purposefully not promoted this blog, not to my friends, family, colleagues, or anybody. But I have written it with the belief that eventually they all might see parts of it.

It's like standing in the middle of a prairie where no roads are, and stripping naked, waiting to see if someone comes along.

Anyways, if you do happen to see something that I've written that strikes you, please give a link to your friends. You have my permission. This is not a secret blog.

If you see nothing of value, that's fine too. Just move along, and I wish you the best.

Young Writer? Inexperienced Writer?

I just wanted to point out that I've been writing since 1991, so I guess that makes it 18 years I've been a writer (out of 27). I wrote stories before that date, even books, including comic books, and some of them were at least stapled, but I don't consider any of those my first actual story. My first actual story was titled "A Home Run Adventure" and I made four copies of it. I think that I will consider my first literary work by that criteria: that is--that I purposefully created more than just one copy.

The whole story behind that story was that it was an entry into a short story contest held at an academic convention between the ACE schools of Vancouver Island. I would have been in grade 4, if my memory is correct, and 9 years old, and the year was 1991. I have no recollection of the plot of the story, except that I can assume the protagonist hits a home run. The contest required three copies of the short story, and I remember printing out the story on horrendous, yellow printer paper, with the perforations running up and down both edges. The poor quality of the paper, combined with the fact that some of the ends of the words ran off the edge of the page, and that the toner was running low, meant that the whole thing was barely legible. I didn't win any prizes for that story that year, but I'd say it was the actual start of my literary career. I doubt that any copy of that story survives; maybe someday a historian will lament that it was lost, but I'm not too shaken up about it.

The next year, my mom had got an electronic type-writer, and she was nice enough to let me use it to type out that year's entry into the short story contest. I used crisp, white paper, and the toner was dark enough to actually read. The electronic typewriter gave my work a really professional look. It had to help that I was a meticulous speller and competent with grammar at that age, which was a somewhat rare thing in our small circle of small schools. Content-wise, I switched tacks, and instead of writing about baseball that year, I wrote a kind of moralizing tale about a 10-year-old kid who invites his new neighbour to church with him, and ends up evangelizing the whole neighbour's family. This story actually won second prize in the short story contest. If I remember the details correctly, it was my cousin who won first prize. I remember reading her story and thinking it was pretty good, but that my story was better, but to this day, I can't remember the topic of her story. Anyways, it was this second story that first gave me the idea that I could one day grow up to be a writer.

If you publically recognize a 10-year-old for doing something well, you will have an impact on what shklee believes he can do for the rest of his life. I know, because throughout my teenage years and college years, that Second Prize was always lurking in my subconscious, urging me on to be literary. Not that this was the only pressure. Of course I was also a voracious reader, and it was also at this time that my grandma published her first book, Nicola and Granny, which I also devoured. My brother and I were naturally excited to read that "the author lives in Victoria, BC, and has four children and two grandsons [!]" and it was this that led me to the feeling that I've always held deep down that writing is in my blood.

However, it would be many years before I entered any more contests or submitted any material for publication. The next thing I would count is my journalistic work for the highschool yearbook in 1998, 1999, and 2000, which included some editing and judging poetry submissions. Other than that, I was busy being a kid and doing other things. Not that I didn't write, because I certainly did write, and I dreamed of publishing, but I didn't understand how to go about getting something published. I still don't really understand publishing very well, but I believe I will get somewhere within the next year or two.

So it's been a long eighteen years, and sometimes I feel that I have very little to show for it. I remember my dad sometimes finding me reading or writing in my room, and exhorting me to play outside (at younger years), do some chores (a little older), or go out and get a job (in my teenage years and between semesters at university). It's kind of odd though, my dad always trying to instill on me this desire to be productive, yet not understanding that what I was doing was exactly that. At least, in my mind that's how it was and still is. I think reading, creating imaginary worlds, messing around on the computer, whether it's reading or writing, or watching YouTube videos, or playing video games, or blogging, are all a part of producing a literary human being, and it's the only way I know how to "be productive." So even though he might not have thought I was listening to him, I really was. I was just internalizing his messages, making them my own.

Unfortunately, I still lacked the knowledge and opportunities to publish and get paid for my work, and there were always distractions. So even though I was being "productive" it wasn't the kind of productivity that pays the rent.

I think if I ever have kids, I will try and encourage them to publish their work as early and as often as possible. Not too long ago I read about Christopher Paolini, who wrote Eragon. I remember thinking "why couldn't I have publishers and authors for parents?" Because even though I haven't read Eragon, and therefore cannot judge that it is not a work of genius, I suspect that many many kids are gifted in the same way, but never get the chance to get their work out into the world. There just aren't mechanisms designed to pluck meaningful writing out of the minds of the masses.

Are You a Writer?

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"A bad one," he said.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"A poor one," he said.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"Not a very good one," he said.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"A young one," he replied.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"An inexperienced one," he replied.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"An insecure one," he replied.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"One who needs affirmation," he replied.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"You tell me," he said.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"An unknown one," he said.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.
"An undiscovered one," he said.

"Are you a writer?" she asked.

The right answer is always just plain "Yes."

Tagging

I'm not sure how this is going to work, but I'm going to go through as many of my old posts as I can, and actually begin to put tags on them. Now that I've got a body of work that exists, I can categorize some of it.

Dogma is Fun! (on vegetarianism)

When asked last by a friend last night, "what kind of vegetarian are you?" I admit I felt empowered at that moment. I'm only a vegetarian for 40 days, and I can eat seafood if I want. I felt empowered because I'm the one who makes the rules, not any church, not the Catholic/Mormon/Anglican church, not the book of Leviticus, nor the Qur'an. Not PETA. Me. If I so chose, I could only give up meats ending in "n". Or I could just keep on eating meat when I feel like it.

There's a risk though, of becoming dogmatic when discussing the issue with other vegetarians/vegans. They might get their rules from other places, and they might question where you get your ideas. And you might be tempted to believe that your set of rules for what may and may not be eaten is better than theirs. Meanwhile, they're thinking the same thing about you. Obviously, I do think my method is best, and to an extent, it is also everyone else's method. No one can force anyone else to abstain from certain kinds of meat.

The poet is a translator

A poet is always a translator, whether or not there is something physically sitting in front of him to translate. He translates the essence of the universe into a readable format. Some of my favorite poems are the ones I look back at and think "I couldn't have written that, it's too obvious, too perfect." In those cases, I think these poems already existed in the universe, and I just took them out of the ether. In some cases though, maybe I'm just remembering a long-forgotten strain of somebody else's poem, perhaps a misreading, or an unconscious re-working, but the reason it achieves perfection in my mind is because of its familiarity, the echoing of a previous time. Many times, when I come across such a perfect poem or a perfect line that I think is unique, I will actually discard it because of the fear of plagiarism, that perhaps it is someone else's line that I internalized.

poem

Poetry is like
the art of the simile

Knowing Too Much

As a young writer, I spend a lot of time worrying about all the things I don't know. I'm constantly reading to learn, and lamenting all the subjects on which I know very little. For example, I only speak one language fluently. I can read French and Spanish as long as I have a dictionary at hand, but I could not dream of writing in either of those languages. I have virtually no education in the classics in Greek or Latin. I've only read a few of Shakespeare's plays, and forgotten most of what I read. I've read the Bible, but only in the NIV, which I've learned is the least beautiful, least accurate, most heretical, least reliable, version of the Bible going. I once had an opportunity to study Greek and Hebrew through Sunday School, but I didn't stick with either of these. I lost my Bible software a long time ago, and I'm pretty sure it was illegal anyways. Can you imagine, pirated Bible software?! Of all the things to pirate!

I know how to play practically no musical instruments, and reading music for me is like doing a crossword puzzle. Heck, I didn't even learn how to read a clock properly until just this past year (I had relied on digital displays my entire life until I forced myself to get rid of all of them in my house). I still have trouble with my right and left. I've forgotten most of what I ever knew of songs on the piano, the orchestra bells, and the xylophone. I never did learn how to properly tune the timpani drums. Luckily, I can still remember most of what I learned on the snare drum, but I seem to have lost what little sense of rhythm I ever had. I can't remember the few chords I learned on the guitar, and I can't remember what the strings are: E - A - D - ? - E.

I know virtually nothing about law or medicine, and even if I did, I can't see how either of these things would serve me in the real world, since I don't have any job prospects that would see me using any of this knowledge. I don't know the geography of my own province beyond the basics. I don't know the names of all our representatives at all our levels of government. I don't know much about military strategy, except what I might have picked up playing chess or Dungeons & Dragons, which I doubt is useful in the real world.

I don't know how most of the things in my house are made, or how to repair them. I willfully know nothing about cars, and less willfully almost nothing about bicycles. I still don't know how to make a samosa, even though I've been meaning to teach myself for years.

I can't defend myself in a fight, because I know nothing about martial arts.

Anyways, you can see how I agonize, but the next problem for a writer comes from knowing too much, or from over-researching. I mean, not all characters know everything, and a lot of people just make up answers for things they don't know. It's all well and good for a writer to strive for perfect accuracy in all things, but the more realistic approach would be to somehow get in the head of your character and think like they do, flaws and all. This is a major part of what makes us each unique. We all have our deficiencies, and often we aren't even aware of the places in our knowledge where we're plainly wrong.

It's fair enough for me to agonize over how they do things in a certain area of the world, or a certain era of history, but sometimes I have to realize that just because people are located in the same place, time, and even social class and gender, doesn't mean that they all think alike and believe the same things about the universe. And not just the universe, though that can be important too, but just the expectations that characters place on the way the real world reacts to actions taken upon it. Is a person healthier if they take lots of baths, or if they let a protective layer of dirt accumulate? Is a shaven head a sign of boldness or humility?

The Most Noble Profession

I once said that there are two professions which are noblest of all professions. The farmer, who fills man's stomach, and the priest, who fills his soul.

Now, I'm not so sure I believe that. I believe there is one most noble profession, which is commonly split into two. The soldier, who fights and destroys other men, and the governor, who arranges men into units so that they will not fight amongst themselves.

Why do I believe this? Because I believe that it is natural for men to produce. This is to take men for granted, but I believe that it is acceptable. Men will always produce food, and priests will always produce religion. Or if the second is not sufficient for you, the intellectuals will always produce knowledge. This is our human nature, and it takes no nobility to be that which one already is.

To truly be noble, one must be transformed, molded, and changed beyond what is one's nature. A blessed few are born with noble spirits; by lacking the essential human qualities of empathy, they are equipped to transcend the productive nature of the human spirit, and emerge on the destructive side.

This author speaks from a position on the productive side, as intelligent readers should deduce from the fact that it is in writing, which is a productive act.

Time and Me

I sometimes wonder if my relationship with time is different from everyone else's. I mean, basically I got up at 8:00 this morning, since I didn't have anywhere to go, and I didn't get anything done all day. I mucked around for a couple hours on the computer, saying to myself that I was just going to do a few things before breakfast. But breakfast didn't come until noon. Then, I thought I'd do a few things between then and dinner, so I did a little reading, more messing around on the computer, and before I knew it it was 3:00 PM, and I was getting sleepy. So I laid down in bed, then got up again, read a little bit, listened to some podcasts, and slept until 8:00 PM. Then, I decided that I should call my mom, so I did, talked to my mom and my brother for a little less than an hour, then did some more messing around on the computer, and now it's 11:00 PM, and I haven't accomplished anything all day today. I had planned on doing the dishes and cleaning out the cat's litter box, but now I think I'll leave those things till tomorrow, since I only have a couple of hours before I have to be at work again. All of this on my day off. I didn't even really catch up on my sleep, though I do feel well enough rested. And I never got those lentils cooking, so I'll have to leave them for another day once again, and I'll have to buy something for lunch tonight.

I guess part of the reason why I feel like I have no time at all for anything is that the computer just eats up my time. If it's not World of Warcraft, it's YouTube; if it's not YouTube, it's reading blogs; if it's not reading blogs, it's listening to podcasts; if it's not listening to podcasts, it's watching television programming like Corner Gas, the Daily Show, Stargate, and miscellaneous programs.

But on another level, I think maybe I just live more slowly than other people. Getting up in the morning, I might say I want to have breakfast right away, but it takes me at least two hours to get going to the point where I get out the milk and cereal and actually eat. After breakfast, I say to myself, I'm going to get some work done, but once again, it takes me several hours to get to the point where I get out my work materials and start working. By then, I'm either sleepy or only have a couple of hours before I have to go to work, so essentially no work gets done.

Either I operate on a different schedule than everyone else, or I'm just incredibly bad at time management, but I just feel like the day goes by way too quickly. It basically just leaves me behind. When I try to savour moments, they turn from moments into hours. A moment seems not even worth savouring sometimes, because it's gone as soon as it comes.

Why a Man Might Want to Wear a Skirt

A couple weeks back, I went into Value Village and bought two skirts. The women's kind. I guess there's a lot to say about this simple act, psychologically, but I'll try to keep this post brief.

There are a couple reasons for buying a skirt initially. First of all, I have only ever seen one or two men wear skirts, as a fashion piece, as opposed to dresses. One of these was in the movie Rent, in which the character Angel wears a skirt. Angels, according to Jesus Christ, are sexless, so the name and the skirt and the sexuality all kind of go together. I hope somewhere out there someone is doing a more thorough analysis of that whole movie, because I sense that it's pretty rich in symbolism and stuff.

The other context was that a kid in my high school came to the prom in a kilt. Now, this is not unusual. I've seen lots of men in kilts. And almost universally, they have protested: "It's not a skirt, it's a kilt!" as if that makes it any more manly. "It's tradition!" as if that is the sole factor that makes it cool for a man to wear a female fashion. A kilt is pretty much a skirt. This got me thinking, why can't a heterosexual, masculine man wear an honest-to-goodness skirt.

The third thing that got me wondering about skirts was that I am constantly seeing women around the university campus, as well as elsewhere, taking the skirt to interesting conceptual places. I mean, I've seen the long skirt come back, for example, paired with a standard blouse, or even a men's shirt. Sometimes a long skirt is combined with a flannel coat, like the lumberjacks wear. And universally, skirts at my school are worn with black tights underneath. No one has bare legs, not in the winter anyways. Also, lots of women have taken to wearing denim skirts, which can almost seem masculine, but you think to yourself "no, that's clearly feminine, even though it's denim, because it's in the shape of a skirt."

So women have all these options when it comes to skirts, and men seem to have not so many when it comes to pants. You can wear jeans, cords, khakis, dress pants, cargo pants, and that's about it. You can't wear track pants unless you're actually at the track. You certainly can't wear shorts in the winter, because you can't wear black tights under them.

Now, the thing about a man wearing a skirt that's unambiguously a skirt, while not wearing any other feminine accessories, is that it should, in theory, trigger a similar thought process in everyone that you encounter. If women can wear a skirt that's kind of manly, then surely a man should be able to wear a skirt that's kind of manly.

And that was the sum of my thought process up until the day I actually went into Value Village and bought a pair of skirts. Of course, even that was not so simple, and it took me a few trips to work up the courage to even enter the women's clothing section of the store. I told myself that I could say to anyone who asked that I was just shopping for my girlfriend, or my sister, but what kind of man buys cheap skirts for a woman? I guess it would have to be a really clueless one, which is what I was going to have to pretend to be, though I wasn't quite up to chatting about which skirt my pretend girlfriend would look best in.

Still, as far as I know, there's no law that says a man can't shop in the women's clothing section of a store, and no one asked me to leave. I couldn't say if they gave me strange looks, because I wouldn't make eye contact with anyone as long as I was in that section. Which must have looked strange in itself. Here's a man, smiling, saying hello, and chatting to everyone in all the other sections of the store: books, men's clothing, housewares, furniture, but as soon as he gets into the women's clothing section, he turns completely inward.

After I picked out my skirts, I had no idea what size I am in women's clothing, so I decided I had to try these on. So I went back to the men's section, grabbed a couple pairs of pants, loaded them on top of the skirts, and headed for the change rooms with this big bundle of inidentifiable clothing.

The change room was uneventful. One more awkward moment came when I went to pay at the checkout. I had bought a number of other items, and put them on top of the skirts, and I must have been nervous. At the moment the cashier noticed I was buying skirts, her friend made a joke, which wasn't particularly funny, but I burst out in one big, unbracketed "ha!" The two of them just looked at me, and then went back to their work, one bagging the skirts, the other handling the debit machine.

So now I have these two skirts, and I haven't yet worn them in public. I wear them around the house to get used to the feel of them, and I've worn them to walk down and up the stairs of my apartment building to do my laundry.

I realize that one of the reasons I like to wear skirts, is that I like to imagine a woman might have also worn them at some time. It has little to do with sexiness or femininity, but I guess I just like to try to imagine what that one small part of being a woman is like. That's not at all the reason that I initially set out to wear skirts. My original reason was to question the simple fact that men don't wear skirts, which are essentially neutral pieces of fabric. I wanted to test that barrier, and see if I could break through it. But now, a whole bunch of other factors want to seep in, and I do find myself wondering about the erotic aspect of it all.

Still Unread

I really have to start letting people know about this blog and actually caring about what I write here. Just for futurity's sake: anything written before this post has not yet been read by anyone but me.

On Place in Poetry

Anytime you mention a place name in a work of poetry, it means you're not really there.

For example, if I happen to mention Ireland in a line of poetry, you can be quite sure that the setting of the poem is most definitely not Ireland.

A corollary is that anytime you mention stereotypical tropes associated with a location, like say the green hills, again, you're not in Ireland. You're just imagining it.

A poetic-voice is poor who includes a place name as a signifier of the setting of the poem.








(Some other time I might write about the poor poetic-voice and how he can still be quite useful in good poetry written by a skilled poet. Suffice it to say for now that I believe there is no such thing as a poet. There are only collections of poetic-voices that can be used for varying ends, and the professional knows how to use them to achieve some desired effect. Still, poetic-voices can indeed be judged as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and after that judgment, they can be considered in context, and it can be decided whether or not they are suited to their setting, which is never Ireland.)