Now that “Iron Man 3” is released and rapidly taking over the world, the avalanche of big-budget summer movies has begun. Once that first blockbuster is out of the gates, we can expect at least one giant movie release per weekend until about the middle of August. So what attempt at counter-programming do the geniuses of Hollywood decide to grace us with for the follow-up to “Iron Man 3?” That's right. “The Great Gatsby.” Which is even showing at select theaters in 3D.
Are you kidding me?!
I might have breezed over this in my origin story, but even though I knew early on I was going to be a teacher, settling on the elementary world happened a little later in the timeline. I planned to begin college as a music major, aiming to become a band director until I quickly realized I didn’t have the chops for it. I started thinking about switching to English instead since that was another strength for me, until one of my high school teachers told me that my writing would be wasted in the classroom. I believed her since I was an ignorant and headstrong teenager, but after one Mass Comm class I learned it was more about advertising than anything else, which left a really bad taste in my mouth. I was a declared English major by my sophomore year.
Here’s some advice for the kids out there who might be thinking about someday biting the bullet and pursuing an English major: Prepare yourself to read a lot mind-numbing books you’ve never heard of written by authors you’ll never hear of again. Yeah, there are some writing courses that slide in there, but they are a precious, precious few, and depending on who the writing professor is even they can’t be taken much more seriously than a Saturday Night Live sketch about a creative writing class. I wish I could remember the quote or where I heard it or who was supposed to have said it, but the best description of English professors I’ve ever heard said something about how they teach their students how to overanalyze obscure books so those students will someday be able to teach their own students how to overanalyze the same obscure books. Trust me people, this is a statement not so far removed from the truth.
I suffered through my English major for exactly one academic year, which gave me just enough credits to realize I could automatically and painlessly add an English minor to my resumé a month before graduation, for whatever worth it might prove to have someday, which so far is zero. I can’t even estimate how many books I read in that year, or how many different classifications or genres of literature I had to wade through. To this day I have The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe bookending one of my display shelves. I endured an 8:00 A.M. class titled “Survey of 18th Century British Literature, Part II” because part one didn’t have enough room on the syllabus for all of the boring. I had one quarter with nothing but lit classes and had to keep track of my progress through five different novels I had been assigned to read during a two-week period. I had to watch an acquaintance of mine slowly deteriorate over a period of weeks because he once dared to raise his hand and name Sidney Sheldon as a popular American author, which earned him academic leper status from all of the pretentious pseudo-intellectuals that too frequently populated our classes.
One of the few lasting things I have after my year in the English department is a complete inability to even think about reading any book that would be described as A Classic. Ironically, a lot of literary classics -- books like The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations and the like -- are considered too mainstream or simplistic for the hardcore English nerds to take seriously. To this day I can't bring myself to even consider reading landmark books like those.
I’m not saying I limit my personal reading to the kinds of paperbacks always on that one rack you can find next to the magazines in the grocery store. I like challenging reads, sometimes. I love reading authors with written voices that can stand as monuments to the power of expressive thought. And sometimes, yeah, sometimes I’ll burn through a John Sanford murder mystery over a slow summer weekend. And I’m looking forward to making a trip down to Barnes and Noble sometime soon to pick up Jim Gaffigan’s new book Dad is Fat and hopefully laugh myself stupid while reading it. No apologies for that. I want to read something that’s going to engage me and temporarily pull me out of what’s going on in my life for a few hours, to the degree where I have to stop and remind myself where I am when I put the book down. But The Classics? No. Never. The don’t engage me. They can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. But they all just feel too much like homework.
So in conclusion: If you were eagerly awaiting a 10-Word Movie Review of “The Great Gatsby?” Don’t hold your breath too long.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Day 9: Deep Thoughts and Digital Inspiration
One of the podcasts I listen to is “WTF with Marc Maron.” He’s a
comedian who’s been around forever but never really had a significant
audience until his podcast came along, and now it’s gotten big enough
that he just recently was able to extend it into a television show. Most
of each episode is devoted to him interviewing different comedians,
actors, or musicians about their careers and lives, which almost always
makes for an interesting conversation. Each episode begins with a
monologue where he just goes off discussing whatever is going on in his
life, doing it in a self-deprecating way as he presents a side of
himself that is neurotic to put whatever issues he’s going through with
his neighbors, his career, his girlfriend, or his cats into a proper
perspective. Not many people can talk about themselves so fluently in a
way that’s accessible and interesting. Sometimes it almost comes across
like therapy, and a lot of listeners relate to what he says. Nearly
everyone has their own insecurities and moments of self-doubt after all,
and to hear someone so completely own his collection in such a public
manner is liberating.
One episode awhile back he read a brief article about a mental disorder someone had sent him a link for: Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder. His description of it in a nutshell: Someone walks around with over-the-top egotistical and arrogant behavior in an effort to hide the truth about how insecure and self-hating they actually are. He went through the ten points of the online test that accompanied it and decided he was probably suffering from it. I listened to this episode while lying in bed falling asleep one night, and it kind of jolted me awake when he got to the checklist because I kept thinking, “Okay... yeah.... oh, that’s me... mmm, probably....” and so on. He got to the end and said whatever percentage of affirmative answers indicated the disorder and I thought, "Well, what in the... I said yes to way more than that.”
Now, do I think I have this disorder based on some online quiz? Of course not. I think anyone who is even slightly reflective would look at any kind of online test like that and find ways to identify with them. But it did give me something to think about that still sticks in my head and resurfaces every so often.
To cut to the chase and apply it to this posting marathon I’m now about one-third of the way through: I’m really finding it hard to write about myself every day and believe people are finding so much of this personal sharing and self-reflection to be very interesting. This keeps getting weirder as I go through each day because it pushes me into addressing this strange dichotomy I can’t quite resolve about keeping a blog. One one hand I’m not someone who trusts people easily, and often I’ll hesitate to lower my defenses enough to really let people in. It isn’t about being anti-social or misanthropic, but more, I suspect, about self-preservation: You don’t give someone the power to hurt you unless they get close enough to matter. And I’ve always been more comfortable with the idea of a small, tight group of close people around me and a larger group of people with more distance. But on the other side of that, here I am putting thoughts and feelings out where the whole stinkin’ Internet could find them if it collectively tried hard enough. And while it’s rare I’ll ever come close to posting something that gets close to raw-nerve territory, I’m still putting it out there because at my core I’m really an open book -- maybe it’s looking for what feels like a more controlled way to reach out since I’m deciding what gets written and what doesn’t. Once I open up enough to let someone in (or if someone relentlessly pushes their way in or sneaks in around my defenses when I’m not looking), I don’t hold back much.
But all of this is roundabout, meandering way of getting back to the point that it’s challenging to think of a new topic every day, especially one I think will be interesting enough for anyone to take the time to read. I’ve noticed patterns over the years about what kind of posts draw more reactions and attention (the Summer Vacation archive goes back nearly four years now) and I could try to engineer some topics that would try and skew that direction to stir up the Likes and the comments. But that wasn’t really my point in trying to do this. I want to find ways to challenge myself. And this is where a different podcast entered the picture.
My favorite podcast is “Stuff You Should Know." I’ve mentioned it here before and on Facebook, and seriously, if you find anything about anything interesting you should really give it a try sometime. I was listening to one episode this morning -- a history of how riot control developed into how it works now -- when the two hosts, Josh and Chuck, spent five or ten minutes answering some random questions that people had posted for them on the SYSK Facebook page. One of my favorite things about the podcast is the chemistry between Josh and Chuck, and the way they sometimes they temporarily drift off topic into a whole tangential direction and just talk like two guys hanging out. I enjoyed listening to it so much that I even borrowed one of the questions from their discussion and used it as part of my greeting message at school that morning: “Would you rather live in a world without movies or without cheese?” It really inspired a heated and multi-faceted debate in the five minutes we had before music class.
So running the risk that I won’t get any suggestions, I’m putting the idea out there of having anyone with a question they’d like me to answer to somehow get it to me -- Facebook comment or message, text message, e-mail, real life conversation, whatever -- and sometime next week I’ll take a day to write up a post where I would answer any questions that show up. I won’t promise I’ll answer anything, but it honestly would take something really awful to get me to shy away; here’s your chance test how open of a book I really am and exactly what I’d be willing to answer. I do this same kind of thing with my class on the last day of school, and even though the eleven-year-old kids of the world can come up with surprisingly probing questions, there are usually only two or three I’ll pass on.
Of course this all comes with the condition that enough people even respond to make it interesting. I’ll still answer what comes in if it’s only a question or two, but that would make for a really, really short and phoned-in post. Plus this way I have one less topic I have to think up for myself, and I openly admit that’s probably the biggest reason I’m trying this. So let’s see if this idea goes anywhere.
One episode awhile back he read a brief article about a mental disorder someone had sent him a link for: Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder. His description of it in a nutshell: Someone walks around with over-the-top egotistical and arrogant behavior in an effort to hide the truth about how insecure and self-hating they actually are. He went through the ten points of the online test that accompanied it and decided he was probably suffering from it. I listened to this episode while lying in bed falling asleep one night, and it kind of jolted me awake when he got to the checklist because I kept thinking, “Okay... yeah.... oh, that’s me... mmm, probably....” and so on. He got to the end and said whatever percentage of affirmative answers indicated the disorder and I thought, "Well, what in the... I said yes to way more than that.”
Now, do I think I have this disorder based on some online quiz? Of course not. I think anyone who is even slightly reflective would look at any kind of online test like that and find ways to identify with them. But it did give me something to think about that still sticks in my head and resurfaces every so often.
To cut to the chase and apply it to this posting marathon I’m now about one-third of the way through: I’m really finding it hard to write about myself every day and believe people are finding so much of this personal sharing and self-reflection to be very interesting. This keeps getting weirder as I go through each day because it pushes me into addressing this strange dichotomy I can’t quite resolve about keeping a blog. One one hand I’m not someone who trusts people easily, and often I’ll hesitate to lower my defenses enough to really let people in. It isn’t about being anti-social or misanthropic, but more, I suspect, about self-preservation: You don’t give someone the power to hurt you unless they get close enough to matter. And I’ve always been more comfortable with the idea of a small, tight group of close people around me and a larger group of people with more distance. But on the other side of that, here I am putting thoughts and feelings out where the whole stinkin’ Internet could find them if it collectively tried hard enough. And while it’s rare I’ll ever come close to posting something that gets close to raw-nerve territory, I’m still putting it out there because at my core I’m really an open book -- maybe it’s looking for what feels like a more controlled way to reach out since I’m deciding what gets written and what doesn’t. Once I open up enough to let someone in (or if someone relentlessly pushes their way in or sneaks in around my defenses when I’m not looking), I don’t hold back much.
But all of this is roundabout, meandering way of getting back to the point that it’s challenging to think of a new topic every day, especially one I think will be interesting enough for anyone to take the time to read. I’ve noticed patterns over the years about what kind of posts draw more reactions and attention (the Summer Vacation archive goes back nearly four years now) and I could try to engineer some topics that would try and skew that direction to stir up the Likes and the comments. But that wasn’t really my point in trying to do this. I want to find ways to challenge myself. And this is where a different podcast entered the picture.
My favorite podcast is “Stuff You Should Know." I’ve mentioned it here before and on Facebook, and seriously, if you find anything about anything interesting you should really give it a try sometime. I was listening to one episode this morning -- a history of how riot control developed into how it works now -- when the two hosts, Josh and Chuck, spent five or ten minutes answering some random questions that people had posted for them on the SYSK Facebook page. One of my favorite things about the podcast is the chemistry between Josh and Chuck, and the way they sometimes they temporarily drift off topic into a whole tangential direction and just talk like two guys hanging out. I enjoyed listening to it so much that I even borrowed one of the questions from their discussion and used it as part of my greeting message at school that morning: “Would you rather live in a world without movies or without cheese?” It really inspired a heated and multi-faceted debate in the five minutes we had before music class.
So running the risk that I won’t get any suggestions, I’m putting the idea out there of having anyone with a question they’d like me to answer to somehow get it to me -- Facebook comment or message, text message, e-mail, real life conversation, whatever -- and sometime next week I’ll take a day to write up a post where I would answer any questions that show up. I won’t promise I’ll answer anything, but it honestly would take something really awful to get me to shy away; here’s your chance test how open of a book I really am and exactly what I’d be willing to answer. I do this same kind of thing with my class on the last day of school, and even though the eleven-year-old kids of the world can come up with surprisingly probing questions, there are usually only two or three I’ll pass on.
Of course this all comes with the condition that enough people even respond to make it interesting. I’ll still answer what comes in if it’s only a question or two, but that would make for a really, really short and phoned-in post. Plus this way I have one less topic I have to think up for myself, and I openly admit that’s probably the biggest reason I’m trying this. So let’s see if this idea goes anywhere.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Day 8: The Nourishment of Disappointment
Today's post is going to be kind of stream of consciousness, so I'll
preface it in a way that I hope will help people understand what I'm
writing about. Nearly every kid playing high school football has dreams
about someday making it to the NFL, but a very small percentage even get
the chance to play in college. The ones who become college football
players know they've made it over the first hurdle and think they've got
a better chance than before, but even fewer ever get their shot at
playing in the NFL when the time comes. And once the pageantry of Draft
Day is over and the real work starts, they have to fight and struggle to
keep their position. Even with all of that, I keep hearing the
statistic that the average NFL player has a career of about five years.
So imagine what kind of odds Payton Manning had to beat to become Payton
Manning.
I see this series of trying to jump through smaller and smaller hoops as a good analogy for what it takes to become a published author. My attempts and inevitable frustrations with that goal have been well-documented here on Summer Vacation, but perhaps some of you don't know I'm not the only writer in my family. Three of my cousins can also lay claim to that sad and desperate title, but at different stages in our character arcs: One, much like me, is a teacher with a writing background and a strong voice he's developed over many years, who has hacked away at manuscripts with the hope of having one someday see the light of day. One is younger than I am and has actually broken through to some success, having published a library-bound middle-grade series with a publishing company local to the Cities. That taste of success, along with a crazy amount of dedication and hard work, also took him far enough to land a literary agent for his follow-up manuscript. Cousin #3 is a middle school kid who is all over the place with his ambition right now, playing with different ideas, using his ability in school and developing a written voice that I wouldn't have minded having in my early teenage years.
When school ended today and I was waiting to walk my partner out to the parking lot, I checked my e-mail and saw that Cousin #2 had broken off his professional relationship with his agent today. He gave me a quick update on how it all happened, and frankly I wasn't that surprised. I know nothing about the agent other than what he's told me and he's never said anything bad, but as optimistic as he'd been about working with her when they got together, things didn't work out. And though it's disappointing, we agreed that the break was really for the best. After all, as anyone who was spent waaaay too much time reading author blogs and writer message boards and online articles about the publishing industry would tell you, it isn't enough for a writer to have an agent if it isn't the right agent.
I've had a couple near-brushes with literary agents myself. I've made semi-serious attempts at submitting two of my manuscripts, and each of those two manuscripts got as far as two different agents asking to see them but both ultimately passing. Disappointing both times, but not surprising because I know how hard it is to make this happen. But the disappointment is more tempered for me now than it would have been ten or fifteen years ago. Closing in on a semi-landmark birthday in not too many more days means that a lot of life has already gone by for me, and any kind of a career I would have as an author would wind up being something very different than what I would have imagined it as when I was fifteen or twenty or thirty. I know I'm not going to be the bestselling multi-millionaire with a movie theater built into my private jet, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want that at this point. Who wants the hassle?
But it would be nice to someday take a story idea that I like and work hard at making it something special, then someday having it find the widest audience it could. Writing is a solitary chore, but it's ultimately about communicating ideas and sharing some of yourself. When I post something here and check the hit count later to see how many people visited the link, it's nice to occasionally find out that something connected with people enough that more than usual came to read it. I'm a pretty internal person, so whatever I do with writing often becomes a way people first learn things about me that otherwise would be (admittedly) difficult to learn. But I think almost anything I take the time to write has a piece of me in it, especially a manuscript. I'll usually spend some time refining these blog posts to make whatever my message is clear and (hopefully) enjoyable or thought-provoking, but I put myself into almost everything I write. I prewrite birthday card greetings. I'll write first and second drafts of Post-It notes that I'm sticking on something I'm passing off to another teacher. I'll edit text messages before I click send. I'll revise shopping lists that I'm going to delete off my phone before I even make it to the checkout.
I guess in a roundabout way I'm trying to say tonight that no matter how hopeless the odds are of one of my manuscripts ever becoming something I can walk into Barnes and Noble and see on the shelf, I still keep writing because I have to. I can't imagine a time in my life when I would ever just decide to stop. The ideas and the compulsion to express them would still eventually reach the point where I would have to get them out somehow, and not doing that would be like never being able to let go of a massive sneeze that had built up in my head. And I know that my cousin is the same way. Losing one agent might be a disappointment, but it's also giving him a renewed chance at chasing the dream. I've been chasing it a lot longer than he has, and I have no plans of walking away.
And if this going only means I'm in for a lifetime of disappointments? Then that's how it goes. There are different levels of disappointment after all. A lot of guys in the world are walking around still proud of their eight-month NFL careers. Or the starting spot they earned on their college team. Or when their high school team was only one round away from the state quarterfinals.
I don't need to be Payton Manning. Or Justin Cronin, or Nick Hornby, or Stephen King. But it'd sure be nice to someday see the blood I poured onto my pages on the same shelf beside theirs.
I see this series of trying to jump through smaller and smaller hoops as a good analogy for what it takes to become a published author. My attempts and inevitable frustrations with that goal have been well-documented here on Summer Vacation, but perhaps some of you don't know I'm not the only writer in my family. Three of my cousins can also lay claim to that sad and desperate title, but at different stages in our character arcs: One, much like me, is a teacher with a writing background and a strong voice he's developed over many years, who has hacked away at manuscripts with the hope of having one someday see the light of day. One is younger than I am and has actually broken through to some success, having published a library-bound middle-grade series with a publishing company local to the Cities. That taste of success, along with a crazy amount of dedication and hard work, also took him far enough to land a literary agent for his follow-up manuscript. Cousin #3 is a middle school kid who is all over the place with his ambition right now, playing with different ideas, using his ability in school and developing a written voice that I wouldn't have minded having in my early teenage years.
When school ended today and I was waiting to walk my partner out to the parking lot, I checked my e-mail and saw that Cousin #2 had broken off his professional relationship with his agent today. He gave me a quick update on how it all happened, and frankly I wasn't that surprised. I know nothing about the agent other than what he's told me and he's never said anything bad, but as optimistic as he'd been about working with her when they got together, things didn't work out. And though it's disappointing, we agreed that the break was really for the best. After all, as anyone who was spent waaaay too much time reading author blogs and writer message boards and online articles about the publishing industry would tell you, it isn't enough for a writer to have an agent if it isn't the right agent.
I've had a couple near-brushes with literary agents myself. I've made semi-serious attempts at submitting two of my manuscripts, and each of those two manuscripts got as far as two different agents asking to see them but both ultimately passing. Disappointing both times, but not surprising because I know how hard it is to make this happen. But the disappointment is more tempered for me now than it would have been ten or fifteen years ago. Closing in on a semi-landmark birthday in not too many more days means that a lot of life has already gone by for me, and any kind of a career I would have as an author would wind up being something very different than what I would have imagined it as when I was fifteen or twenty or thirty. I know I'm not going to be the bestselling multi-millionaire with a movie theater built into my private jet, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want that at this point. Who wants the hassle?
But it would be nice to someday take a story idea that I like and work hard at making it something special, then someday having it find the widest audience it could. Writing is a solitary chore, but it's ultimately about communicating ideas and sharing some of yourself. When I post something here and check the hit count later to see how many people visited the link, it's nice to occasionally find out that something connected with people enough that more than usual came to read it. I'm a pretty internal person, so whatever I do with writing often becomes a way people first learn things about me that otherwise would be (admittedly) difficult to learn. But I think almost anything I take the time to write has a piece of me in it, especially a manuscript. I'll usually spend some time refining these blog posts to make whatever my message is clear and (hopefully) enjoyable or thought-provoking, but I put myself into almost everything I write. I prewrite birthday card greetings. I'll write first and second drafts of Post-It notes that I'm sticking on something I'm passing off to another teacher. I'll edit text messages before I click send. I'll revise shopping lists that I'm going to delete off my phone before I even make it to the checkout.
I guess in a roundabout way I'm trying to say tonight that no matter how hopeless the odds are of one of my manuscripts ever becoming something I can walk into Barnes and Noble and see on the shelf, I still keep writing because I have to. I can't imagine a time in my life when I would ever just decide to stop. The ideas and the compulsion to express them would still eventually reach the point where I would have to get them out somehow, and not doing that would be like never being able to let go of a massive sneeze that had built up in my head. And I know that my cousin is the same way. Losing one agent might be a disappointment, but it's also giving him a renewed chance at chasing the dream. I've been chasing it a lot longer than he has, and I have no plans of walking away.
And if this going only means I'm in for a lifetime of disappointments? Then that's how it goes. There are different levels of disappointment after all. A lot of guys in the world are walking around still proud of their eight-month NFL careers. Or the starting spot they earned on their college team. Or when their high school team was only one round away from the state quarterfinals.
I don't need to be Payton Manning. Or Justin Cronin, or Nick Hornby, or Stephen King. But it'd sure be nice to someday see the blood I poured onto my pages on the same shelf beside theirs.
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