Not Exactly Resolutions

For the last three years I’ve spent my days at a desk, on my butt, in front of a screen. My partner Andrew is a health conscious guy and the two of us have been trying to figure out a way to exercise together for all three of these years. Finally, a month ago, we broke down and joined the local gym, I switched my work schedule to 8:30 and we made our goal to be out the door by 6:30.

I’m bad at routines. Which is part of the reason I’ve never successfully had an exercise regimen and is the main reason that I’ve never followed the one piece of universal writing advice: have a writing routine. My writing, like my exercise, has been hodge-podge, wherever I can fit it in.

But last week I deviated from the new exercise routine and left the gym a little early to go sit in a café and write for forty-five minutes. For the fiftieth time, I began the same chapter I’ve been working on for the last two months and in those forty-five minutes I busted through all that self-torture and finally wrote something I liked.

I altered the exercise schedule. Now we leave a half hour earlier for our physical exercise and then I go sit in a café for forty-five minutes of writing exercise. So far, things are looking good, and now that my day starts so productively, I end up on such a high I barely need a cup of coffee!

Being the dork that I am, I googled how to establish and maintain routines. Apparently it takes about three weeks for something to officially become a part of your life to the point where you feel obligated to maintain it.

I’ve got two weeks to go, but I’m feeling confident.

In Contrast - Thankful

About two weeks ago I figured out something really important about one of the characters in my novel: she had been interned in the Funter Bay Aluet internment camp.  I knew that figuring this out was important for both her and me.

Old cannery building at Funter Bay.  Taken by Marjorie Menzi, 2004.

Of course, the problem was, I knew very little about these interment camps.  I knew the basics, that they existed and that almost a thousand Aleuts were removed from their homes by the US government.  Why was this done?  Who went there?  What were the camps like?  How long were the "prisoners" held?  I had no idea.  And so I embarked on my very first fiction related research project.

The building I work in also houses the Alaska State Library and the state library's historical collections.  So on my lunches I became a regular visitor.  Did you know that if you're an Alaska resident you can make 10 free copies a day and receive three high quality digital scans of photographs a year?

Adak - Photo from nps.org

But there wasn't much.  The biggest thing I found was an original report typed up by one of the main organizers of the camps in which he described the conditions of the camp from the point of view of a government employee.

One thing he said, really hit home:  "However, at WardCove camp being located among the tall spruce and hemlock trees with 'no air' to which they were accustomed at home with only tall grass and continuous breezes and winds, the Aleuts did express a sense of oppression and suffocation."

Reading this line during my second research lunch, I could feel things clicking.  Imagining the forest of Southeast Alaska, forests that I find comforting in the way they envelope a person, to imagine coming from a land of endless expanse and openness to this?  Yes.  That could be horrible.  Especially if you'd never been in a landscape like ours.

Then this morning I found this document in the National Archives:

 

That first line: "We the people of this place wants a better place than this to live.  This place is no place for a living creature."

This is a petition by the Aleut women interned in the Funter Bay Evacuation Camp.

When these women returned to their homes they found their buildings looted, some in ruins, and their churches in shambles.  Those from Atka?  Their village was burned to the ground so that the Japanese couldn't use it.

And here I am, sitting in my lovely home, drinking a lovely cup of coffee with irish cream on Thanksgiving Day trying to envision the lives of these women who had to drink impure water and watch all of their loved ones fall sick and then return to a home that was no longer home.  

The contrast is almost more powerful than I can handle.

I am feeling very fortunate and thankful today.

Blogging About Twitter

Although I started my twitter account a mere four days ago, I’m already feeling like a convert.

To begin with, while I’ve been a long time fan of both blogging and facebook, I swore up and down that Twitter was: stupid, pointless, exactly like facebook, and something that I would NEVER use.

Two things made me change my mind:

1. When my Uncle Ray joined Facebook, his daughter left a note on his page that read “dad, you’re so late in the game on facebook – everyone’s on twitter now. jeeze!”
2. I’m currently listening to the audiobook version of Franzen’s Freedom. There is a scene in which a college-age daughter is arguing with her father’s assistant. The assistant insists that she’s a young person and understands young people just as well, she’s 27 (my age) for god’s sake! But the daughter insists that there is a whole world of difference in her understanding of technology and the assistant’s, that the assistant didn’t grow up with cell phones and doesn’t understand that young people barely even email anymore.

Now, neither of these things made me sit up and say, “oooh, I need to communicate with the young people, sign me up for Twitter!” What they did do was make me realize that I was being mule-headed. I was being a bit of an old fart. Why was I being all snooty about Twitter? I enjoy reading the daily compilation of twitter posts that Jezebel puts up every day, so why didn’t I have my own Twitter account.

So I got one.

And now, I’m a little bit obsessed with the posting format. Twitter famously only allows 140 characters in every post (which includes spaces). I knew this. What I didn’t know was that there is a countdown in the lower right-hand corner of the posting box. The numbers race down and often I’m at 60, and then 40, and then  -3 characters before I even get halfway out of the gate. So then I go back and try and find places where I can condense, lose the unnecessary words. I don’t like abbreviations or internet speak (WTF, TOFL, FTW), so instead I’m playing with punctuation and word choice.

Twitter provides the perfect format for editing a sentence down to the essentials. I’m tempted to type every sentence from my novel into the twitter post box just to watch the countdown and then remove the fat. It’s like a minimalist’s dream tool. The only problem, is that a novel needs sentences longer, sometimes much longer, than 140 characters.

Words v. Numbers

 "Additionally, a derivative may have complex aspects that require the auditor to have special knowledge to evaluate the measurement and disclosure of the derivative in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles.  For example, features embedded in contracts or agreements may require separate accounting as a derivative, and complex pricing structures may increase the complexity of the assumptions used in estimating the fair value of a derivative."

A week ago I finished editing 200 pages of a manual that contained nothing but sentences similar to the above.  I had two weeks to complete this project.

I spent hours and hours staring at these words.  Words that were no longer words.  Words that dreamt of being numbers.  At least numbers have the pure pleasure of being unadulterated signifiers.  There was no joy in these words, they existed only to point towards specific concepts.  The sentences, paragraphs, and chapters circled around and around each idea, like sharks around a bloody hunk of meat, all purpose, all force.

My job was to make sure that the sentences and paragraphs all fit within generally accepted standards of English grammar.  I dutifully marked it all up, debating each word, reading paragraphs and sentences over and over again.  "Does this sentence make sense?  Do these words make sense?  What is it talking about?  Is this a phrase that is common in auditing procedures?"  Sometimes when I went over my edits with a manager she would shrug and say "nobody is going to read this.  It doesn't really matter."

I've only ever had one other experience in my life when English sounded so completely foreign to me, and in that instance I was 14 and playing pool with two Scottish boys in a hostel in Northeast Scotland.

My goal this fall is to finish the novel that's been bumping around my head for the last several years.  While I edited the manual at work, I spent my evenings at home on my own writing.  I've always wanted to write a fairytale.  So I wrote a fairytale for a chapter.

What a pleasure to write living words instead of dead signifiers.