I, Nerd

In my high salad days, I was a terrific nerd.  I've gone through several variants of nerdiness since high school, some of them classic archetypes, some boarding on normal, some scary in their own right.  After college, I became much more balanced and even sociable to the point that I had actually forgot just how bad I used to be.  Here's a sample:

Starting around junior year, I was on the chess team in high school.  More than that, I spent my lunch hour in the math teacher's classroom (he was also our coach) mastering chess problems and playing speed chess, and this during a time I actually had my own car and could have propelled myself into some inchoate form of popularity by leaving campus and eating at the "cool" joints.  I spent thousands of not-very-hard-earned dollars on Magic: the Gathering, played in local pro-sanctioned tournaments, and still own most of my cards, though I don't play anymore.   I played a druid in AD&D until my teenage hormonal imbalance made me angsty enough to graduate to Vampire: the Masquerade.  I even played MUSH (Massive User Shared Halucination) text-based games over the Telnet, logging in days, maybe even months of my life role-playing alternate identities.   Like most boys, I was fascinated with dinosaurs, but my devotion remained long after most healthy children take up sports-- or for that matter, begin dating, move out of their parents houses, and have children.  As a child, I watched Bill Nye the Science Guy, Beakman's World, and literally took notes on MacGyver, once building a small fertilizer bomb based on what I learned from an episode.  Only two semesters of science were required in high school, but I took a class every semester for four years including my favorite science of physics, which ironically, I nearly failed due to my then-developing lethargy toward homework and complete inability to do even the math required to play Scrabble.  I even read chapters that weren't required, and spent my free time reading books by Asminov, Hawkings, Sagan, and Greene.  Once, on our senior trip, I found myself in a hotel room in Paris explaining general relativity to a drunk line-backer because he wanted to understand his place in the cosmos.  I was also one of the proud few who knew how to optimize the first megabyte of RAM in MSDOS to ensure my PC could run Descent as efficiently as possible.

I'm not trying to say I was smart.  Far, far from it.  I was never in any advanced classes in high school.  Laziness has been the bane of my academic achievement since I first realized, in first grade, I could save myself the trouble of loading my backpack every evening if I just left all my homework in my desk and did it hastily the next morning.  Since then, I've been sublimely lazy. On top of that, I have the memory capacity of a Cassio wrist-watch.  I've been bested at the Memory Game by four year olds and often can't recall major events or people in my own life.  I did, some how, pass an advanced placement test for math in middle school but I never actually bothered to sign up for it.  I'm positive, though, if I did I would have been drummed out in less than a week.  Really, there must have been an administrative error that occurred after they reviewed my test because math and I just do not get along well.  Maybe the scan-tron machine, after decades of boolean input, decided to take a more artistic interpretation of my penciled-in squares and decided my test was "pretty."  I don't know.  I do know that I can't be trusted to balance a check book, or give small change for a dollar, or calculate a tip, or even be the banker in Monopoly without unmitigated, economic disaster.  

Why I am writing about all of this?  I guess I've just been reminiscing, and lately my old nerd-tastic tendencies have been coming back in full force.  My love of science being chief among them.  I'll make no bones about it, science was my first love and that love has always been around since I was little.  I was memorizing latin names of megafauna as soon as I could read them.  I was catalogue rocks from the yard as soon as I could walk out the door unsupervised, and at every stage of my life, I've wanted to become some form of scientist: a micro-biologist, a geologist, an astronomer, a paleontologist, a forensic scientist.  Lets face it though, I've never been all that good at it.  Real scientists are fastidious and comprehensive.  They can spend nearly their entire lives in dedication to a single experiment, and the rest of their life in defense of that single experiment.  They tread water just to keep up with their peers, overwhelmed with results, data, new experiments, new theories, even new BRANCHES of entire sciences.  Its an entirely UNromantic reality they live in and you just have to have the personality to cope with it.  I don't.  

I love to read about it, though.  I love to be part of it in that small way, but not immersed in it.  I couldn't live like that.  I am, however, starting to find myself more and more interested in communicating the sciences to other people, in writing about them.  I have always had that talent and I'd like to find the opportunity express it more.  These days, with our scientific education lack so severely in our schools, its more important than ever to encourage people's natural curiosity of the subject.  And people are curious.  Its a natural human survival instinct to want to know how the world around you works.  Our anti-intellectual culture has a way of stigmatizing that tendency, but with a little nurturing, it often comes back to life.

Climate Change, or more popularly, Global Warming, is a scientific subject that, in particular, needs a hefty amount of explaining.  Unsurprisingly, the media has done a piss-poor job so far and some one needs to do it.  I've reading up in my spare time on climate sciences and in the next few weeks I intend to blog a bit on my take of the subject.  I'll see you then.

Writing with the Subconscious

There's been a flood of sage advice coming at me lately, for what reason I don't know.  Truth be told, none of it has really helped . . . yet.  I assume that at some point that will change.  Possibly when I begin to heed said advice, but lets not get overly speculative here.  Yesterday, my Dad gave me a book on the subject of writing called, "Writing Down the Bones."  He doesn't read these sorts of things so Lords know where he got it from.  It just sort of popped up out of nowhere, with no explicable reason for him having it, or wanting to read it,  or having the motivation to get dressed, leave his house, and buy things.  But really, it seems like a decent enough book when its all said and done.  Or at least, it seems that way from the cover and the couple of pictures I saw while flipping through it.  

Its written by some lady named Natalie Goldberg, who by odd coincidences, happens to live in Taos.  Or at least she did when she was alive.  She may still be alive for all I know, but I wanted to put that qualifier in there just in case she's at the bottom of a ravine right now, her neck being chewed clean through by coyotes.  If that were the case, I'd come out quite the fool if I said she was still alive, eh?   The fact that she lives in Taos, and that her book was in random possession by my own father, leads me to believe, by the logic of my Hollywood-trained brain, that I'm going to have a life crisis soon and that I'm going to have a cute- meet with Mrs. Goldberg at a bus  depot.  She'll listen to my foibles and set me on the path to self-actualization in my third act.   I can't wait.   Until then, I'll just read the book and from the bits and pieces that I've managed to read while waiting for the toaster to pop up with my tasty tortilla nibblets, her book actually seems rather fascinating.  We seem to have drawn similar conclusions about the craft.  

In a chapter titled, 'Composting,' she illuminates with much greater clarity, a concept that I've been rambling on about for some time now: the idea that failed writing is necessary.  I'll admit right now that I hadn't come to the exact conclusion as she, and actually do prefer her version of it.  Here's the gist: the subconscious works, like a computational sub-routine, quietly in the background of your thoughts.  Spontaneous leaps of creativity, logic, and understanding come from this capacity of the subconscious.  In order for this part of mind to work efficiently, we need to feed it raw materials, events, characters, things from our past, emotions, experiences, whatever.  By writing, in freeform, in automatic writing, in journals, diaries, blogs, we do precisely this.  We till the soil of our thought, turn over ideas, bring them to the surface and let them breathe, settle.  

While you're working away at other things consciously, like say, trying to perfectly toast a tortilla so that the surface temperature is just right for melting butter into a gooey puddle of deliciousness, you're subconscious is beneath it all, toiling in the dark recesses of your brain.  It may come to conclusions down there in the cellar that you never would have come to just by analysis, and when its done and ready with one of those conclusions, they bubble up to the surface at seemingly random times, like say, while eating a soft, buttery tortilla.  We call these Eureka! moments.  Not necessarily having anything to do with the Sci-Fi Channel show, Eureka!, but having more to do with the surprise and clarity of the thought bubbling up from the obscure machinery of the mind.

When you're writing out the back of your behind, like I usually do on this blog, and failing miserably at the point you're trying desperately to illustrate, you're doing yourself quite a service.  Isn't that nice to hear?  You are actively feeding the subconscious the materials it needs to germinate the greater ideas, the more coherent ones that you will ideally capitalize on once you recognize them.  Most writers know this intuitively, as I did for many years.  This why most novels are proceeded by the writing of pages and pages and pages of 'notes,' and why note taking is essential to the process of non-fiction writing.  Everything feeds into the subconscious and gets slushed around like so much wet concrete until the appropriate moment.

My biggest revelation, lately has been my understanding that the first draft of a story is essentially a part of this process: composting.  This is why most writing advice urges you to hurry through the first draft as quickly as possible.  The idea is to culminate the final stage of rumination inside of your subconscious so that the second draft will be more finely crafted.  In general terms, the first draft is the great big pile of shit from which grows the real story.  Hurry through it, get that big ol' plop down and let it sit.  It doesn't matter how terrible this version of the story is, because, in essence, it is NOT a version of the story.  Its nothing more than a comprehensive set of notes from which you will be able to see what works, what doesn't, and why.  Consider this an intentional failure.  The first draft will stink, get used to that concept and begin believing in the necessity of it stinking.  Compost doesn't come in any other odors. . . . Tortillas on the other hand, will never cease in their savory fragrances and so, I'm going to go eat one.  Adios, o' mi hermanos y amigos solomente.

On Politics

For the first time in my life I wrote my Senators.  I've got two of them.  You've got two of them.  I wrote them both.  I had hoped for a salve to sooth the burning sensation I felt, still feel, like a spider bite in my chest.  The bill amendment I  wrote about had already been voted on and I don't harbor any delusions that I'll affect their future voting habits.  This is why I considered it a salve and not a remedy.  I needed to make a gesture, just flap my arms, huff my chest, let out a little shudder of distaste.  Or I thought I did.

Does it matter what I wrote them about?  This is not a political message at its core.  There are people far more qualified than I who blog daily on the subject of politics.  They've spent their lives in vigilance and if you've the mind to read or listen to that sort, then you probably already have and you don't need me to further evangelize.

But there's a sense I've been having, very distinct, that a once great momentum is being systematically diverted.  Other people have been aware of this far longer than I and beyond that I think there is a general sense of it in the American people at large, too, if only as a fleeting, discomforting thought.  Blind and contended as we're made out to be, its there.  We see traffic cameras and we know we are being watched.  We read the news and know there are pages missing.  We see kids in their schools and know they could have, should have, much more than what we've provided.  

I feel it, know it, but I'm not out there marching.  I'm not speaking out.  I'm not finding my representatives and giving them the hell they deserve.  I read the news, listen to the radio, and hear every plea in my head that something MORE must be done, but I haven't brought myself to any action.  I vote my conscience and glad that, for once in my life, I have the opportunity to vote for some one I believe in and not merely against some one I don't.   Beyond that it is only a vote.  Sure, we're told that voting is a great act of citizenship, a duty, but to be honest, I when I left the polling booth last week, I felt like I was just filling out a restaurant comment card.  Did you like our service?  Would you visit us again in the future?  Were our servers kind and courteous?

I want only to know why: why it has taken me so long just to write two emails.  I've known all my life that I was being trained to ignore the world around me.  You feel it to, that sense, don't you?  Its as though there's a magician out there somewhere trying to get us to look at his right hand, when really the canary is in his left--and we don't give a damn because he puts on one hell of a show.  We're deluded and we don't care.  That's my generation's mantra, but I just don't know how much longer I can go on with all this double-thinking going on in my head.

I hope that writing as I did, to Domenici and Bingaman, wasn't just an isolated outburst.  I need to feel, more than I ever have in my life, like I am fighting.  Not just against the forces of erosion in the world, not just against the selfish lot who are driving modern policy, but against this apathetic feeling in my heart.  If that's corny, then fine, its corny.  Have a good laugh.  

If any one has any stories of activism they'd like to share, I'm willing to listen.  I know its the small changes that have led to the large and, like Archimedes, I'd just like to know where to stand.