I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now.
If you aren’t familiar with Schrodinger’s Cat, it’s a thought experiment that says (and I’m putting this very, very simplistically because I sure don’t understand the whole thing) that two possibilities can equally exist as truth until one of them has been proven wrong. Imagine there’s this opaque, soundproof box with a cat inside. Additionally there’s material in the box that would kill the cat after a certain amount of time has expired. If that time mark has been reached, the cat can’t be proven alive or dead, even though all evidence should support it being dead. Because it can’t be proven alive or dead, that means it’s alive and dead at the same time.
I find the little I know about thought experiments to be pretty interesting. I’ve learned it’s probably best to leave understanding them to the quantum physicists who think them up.
Anyway.
I like to apply the same idea behind Schrodinger’s Cat — or at least my likely misinterpreted understanding of it — to dealing with the same unresolved events each of us encounters several times each day. Say, for example, you’re anxiously awaiting a phone message or a text from someone with very important news. You’re going about your day, and DING. Whatever your notification sound is goes off, alerting you to a new message. You look at your phone and see who it’s from. Oooh! The person you’ve been waiting to hear from!
You know that hybrid feeling of dread and anticipation you’re immediately hit with when you see that message has arrived? I say that comes from knowing you’re about to either face the dream or the nightmare. That might be kind of dramatic, but in some cases probably not. Something huge you’re waiting to have happen and have been hoping against hope for so long has finally arrived at your metaphorical doorstep. Will you experience jubilation or disappointment? Have you ever gotten such a message and hesitated for even a moment before discovering what it says? There’s that Schrodinger’s Cat moment. You want to prolong the possibility that the dream might come true because you know it’s possible that it won’t once you discover the truth. You want to keep the cat alive for a little longer.
This works the other way, too. Let’s say you were waiting to hear news that wasn’t so good, maybe something like a test results from a doctor, or some kind of financial or legal issue that could upset your life, or an update on the condition of someone you care about who is faced with some serious problem. You can hope things will work out for the best, but in cases like these there’s very little you can do other than wait. What happens when that email notification pops up? Would you open it right away to find out what happened? Or would you be feeling such an undercurrent of expectant dread that you’d want to spend a few more seconds living in a world where the bad news you’re anticipating isn’t real? You don’t want to open the box because you don’t want to discover that the cat has died.
Everyone has possibilities like this they have to face. They aren’t all life-altering events, but I’d say everyone has probably had their share of those, or will eventually. I wonder how many people would consider themselves to be optimistic and brave enough to see the notification and jump right in to find out the truth immediately. Sometimes I am, but usually I put it off as long as I can, letting both possibilities exist until I can’t stand it anymore, then I just tear off the Band-Aid before I can sink any further into anxiousness.
I’m not sure why I’ve been thinking about this so much in the past few days. The calendar would make it seem like it would have something to do with the approaching end of the school year, but I’m not finding the connection…one more thing to think about, I guess.
Anyway. May is over in a few hours. Everyone have a nice June, and try to squeeze as many happy moments from it as you can.
Friday, May 31, 2019
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Day 23: 10 Years Later
My first blog post was on May 23, 2009.
A few things that have changed since then:
*I had a dog. Then I had a long and fairly painful period without a dog. Now I have another.
*I went from my early 40s to my early 50s.
*I started writing the blog as a way to keep my writer brain in shape during the stretches of time when I wasn't working on any kind of a project. The idea of ever publishing anything was little more than a pipe dream. Now I have an agent and a manuscript on submission. I'm almost always either actively writing something or planning what to write next. I suspect this shift is probably the biggest reason why my regular posting has declined so much in recent years.
*The number of people who read any typical post started in the single digits, then gradually climbed into the dozens and hundreds, then gradually declined to far more modest numbers again. Undoubtedly a result of my sporadic posting. I'm still thinking hard about what, if anything, I really want to do about this. Any final decisions on this could well involve conversations and advice with that agent. I know there's at least one more post that demands to be written later this summer, but after that....?
Much of what has been written here over the decade has, in one way or another, reflected who I was or what was important to me at the time, whether it was translated through something intentionally stupid or goofy I wrote, or something that reflected a crisis I had been trying to reconcile. In that way it's been very much like a journal I started keeping in my senior year of high school and continued to write in, over five volumes, well into my teaching career. The big difference, of course, is knowing that whatever I wrote here always had a potential audience. A private journal is much more vulnerable and honest, which is why it's probably for the best that it no longer exists.
It was important to me to have daily posts this month, since doing so would push the blog to the landmark number of 30,000 visits and ten years of writing. I don't know if I'm going to add any more new content this month, though. This time around hasn't had the same internal motivation challenging me to come up with something new. I'm hoping this is a good thing and means I might actually be reaching a point as a writer where I don't feel like I have to prove myself to anyone, which would be a nice evolutionary measure. I acknowledge it could just mean I'm lazy. Or just tired. Because it's May and I'm a teacher and literally only other teachers are ever going to be able to understand what a potent combination that is for pure, uncut exhaustion.
My big goal this month was to try and find a way to name every post after a song title, which I've pulled off up until now, but I don't think I will anymore. I will keep posting this month (at least providing Facebook links), but instead of publishing new content I'm going to take a small celebratory lap for reaching this ten year mark. In the place of new posts I'm going to dig into the blog archives for some of my favorites that either had big reactions when they first came out or didn't get the attention I'd hoped for at the time. There are a few in there I really like, and I think people who spend time reading here might enjoy seeing them if they didn't the first time around.
Maybe I'll still add some new content this month, if I'm inspired. But if not, look for those older posts in the next few days if you're reading this now. And thanks for sticking with me for this long.
A few things that have changed since then:
*I had a dog. Then I had a long and fairly painful period without a dog. Now I have another.
*I went from my early 40s to my early 50s.
*I started writing the blog as a way to keep my writer brain in shape during the stretches of time when I wasn't working on any kind of a project. The idea of ever publishing anything was little more than a pipe dream. Now I have an agent and a manuscript on submission. I'm almost always either actively writing something or planning what to write next. I suspect this shift is probably the biggest reason why my regular posting has declined so much in recent years.
*The number of people who read any typical post started in the single digits, then gradually climbed into the dozens and hundreds, then gradually declined to far more modest numbers again. Undoubtedly a result of my sporadic posting. I'm still thinking hard about what, if anything, I really want to do about this. Any final decisions on this could well involve conversations and advice with that agent. I know there's at least one more post that demands to be written later this summer, but after that....?
Much of what has been written here over the decade has, in one way or another, reflected who I was or what was important to me at the time, whether it was translated through something intentionally stupid or goofy I wrote, or something that reflected a crisis I had been trying to reconcile. In that way it's been very much like a journal I started keeping in my senior year of high school and continued to write in, over five volumes, well into my teaching career. The big difference, of course, is knowing that whatever I wrote here always had a potential audience. A private journal is much more vulnerable and honest, which is why it's probably for the best that it no longer exists.
It was important to me to have daily posts this month, since doing so would push the blog to the landmark number of 30,000 visits and ten years of writing. I don't know if I'm going to add any more new content this month, though. This time around hasn't had the same internal motivation challenging me to come up with something new. I'm hoping this is a good thing and means I might actually be reaching a point as a writer where I don't feel like I have to prove myself to anyone, which would be a nice evolutionary measure. I acknowledge it could just mean I'm lazy. Or just tired. Because it's May and I'm a teacher and literally only other teachers are ever going to be able to understand what a potent combination that is for pure, uncut exhaustion.
My big goal this month was to try and find a way to name every post after a song title, which I've pulled off up until now, but I don't think I will anymore. I will keep posting this month (at least providing Facebook links), but instead of publishing new content I'm going to take a small celebratory lap for reaching this ten year mark. In the place of new posts I'm going to dig into the blog archives for some of my favorites that either had big reactions when they first came out or didn't get the attention I'd hoped for at the time. There are a few in there I really like, and I think people who spend time reading here might enjoy seeing them if they didn't the first time around.
Maybe I'll still add some new content this month, if I'm inspired. But if not, look for those older posts in the next few days if you're reading this now. And thanks for sticking with me for this long.
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Day 22: Writer in the Dark
I remember reading an interview with Stephen King a long time ago. He was telling a story of how he had once been walking through the grocery store, looked up, and wondered what it would be like if a pterodactyl were flying around in there. From that random moment, his story "The Mist" came to life.
I read "The Mist" and thought it was cool. I also had a text-based computer game version of it, which I had been excited about but ultimately proved too frustrating to play for very long. I thought the movie version of "The Mist" was great, even if it had arguably the most disturbing ending of any Stephen King movie ever made.
It always fascinated me to think of how a story that took on such a life of its own had started with just a simple "I wonder" moment for the author. A lot of the things I've written have started off in similar ways, with just a strong image or half a premise that I can't shake. For example: Back in the 17-18 school year, I had regular recess duty for the first time in many, many years. Most of the time I didn't mind it. Sometimes it was even a nice break in the day. The important thing was it got me back in the playground. Out at the south end of our school playground is an enormous tree, both majestic and gnarled with age. The roots of it come up out of the dirt like strong knuckles holding onto the ground for dear life.
Maybe it was because it had been so many years since I'd been on the playground to have the time to get a good look at it, but something about the sight stuck with me. About a year and a half after locking on to that image, I found a story for it and wrote a creepy middle grade horror manuscript based in a tree, in three weeks.
A couple days ago I noticed this:
Right beside the parking lot I use every day, wedged between branches in a tree I usually park by, just below a small hole that has a family of birds living behind it, there was this baseball just sitting there.
My first thought was how some kid had been playing with it, probably left it there and then forgot about it. Not a stretch since it's been my considerable experience that most kids are true experts at forgetting about things. But that same ball was in the same place the following morning, and the morning after that, after a long night of pounding rains and punishing wind.
I sat there in my car staring at it through the windshield, and I started thinking: It must be wedged in there pretty tightly to have survived the storms. It had been a couple of days since it appeared and hadn't moved, so it was clearly lost property now. Why would someone have jammed it in there in the first place? That part of the school grounds isn't even close to anywhere kids would be playing anything that would involve a baseball. Was someone missing it? Was it hidden as part of a prank? And if it was, did the baseball have some kind of personal significance to the person who lost it? If it did, what? And, more importantly, why? There had to be some real backstory to how that ball had ended up in the tree. There were also infinite other speculative reasons about how it happened. My brain started collecting them. Not formally writing down notes or anything, but just latching onto some interesting ideas and stashing them in the mental vault.
I guess the point I'm dancing around here, if I can make it without sounding to self-important and arty (because I still feel a little uncomfortable with trying to call myself an artist) is that I think moments like this and the reactions I have to them a part of what makes me a writer. There have been very few instances, if any, when I've intentionally thought "I'm going to write a story about this topic" and go from there. Usually it has more to do with noticing the weird little incongruous things that surround us every day, and considering them from a slightly different perspective.
Maybe someday one of those partial ideas related to that baseball will find an existence. There are a couple already swimming around in the soup of what my Big Secret Project is right now, so it isn't impossible. Not that even this means those ideas will ever come to any fruition, but they sure are interesting to play with and wonder about.
I read "The Mist" and thought it was cool. I also had a text-based computer game version of it, which I had been excited about but ultimately proved too frustrating to play for very long. I thought the movie version of "The Mist" was great, even if it had arguably the most disturbing ending of any Stephen King movie ever made.
It always fascinated me to think of how a story that took on such a life of its own had started with just a simple "I wonder" moment for the author. A lot of the things I've written have started off in similar ways, with just a strong image or half a premise that I can't shake. For example: Back in the 17-18 school year, I had regular recess duty for the first time in many, many years. Most of the time I didn't mind it. Sometimes it was even a nice break in the day. The important thing was it got me back in the playground. Out at the south end of our school playground is an enormous tree, both majestic and gnarled with age. The roots of it come up out of the dirt like strong knuckles holding onto the ground for dear life.
Maybe it was because it had been so many years since I'd been on the playground to have the time to get a good look at it, but something about the sight stuck with me. About a year and a half after locking on to that image, I found a story for it and wrote a creepy middle grade horror manuscript based in a tree, in three weeks.
A couple days ago I noticed this:
Right beside the parking lot I use every day, wedged between branches in a tree I usually park by, just below a small hole that has a family of birds living behind it, there was this baseball just sitting there.
My first thought was how some kid had been playing with it, probably left it there and then forgot about it. Not a stretch since it's been my considerable experience that most kids are true experts at forgetting about things. But that same ball was in the same place the following morning, and the morning after that, after a long night of pounding rains and punishing wind.
I sat there in my car staring at it through the windshield, and I started thinking: It must be wedged in there pretty tightly to have survived the storms. It had been a couple of days since it appeared and hadn't moved, so it was clearly lost property now. Why would someone have jammed it in there in the first place? That part of the school grounds isn't even close to anywhere kids would be playing anything that would involve a baseball. Was someone missing it? Was it hidden as part of a prank? And if it was, did the baseball have some kind of personal significance to the person who lost it? If it did, what? And, more importantly, why? There had to be some real backstory to how that ball had ended up in the tree. There were also infinite other speculative reasons about how it happened. My brain started collecting them. Not formally writing down notes or anything, but just latching onto some interesting ideas and stashing them in the mental vault.
I guess the point I'm dancing around here, if I can make it without sounding to self-important and arty (because I still feel a little uncomfortable with trying to call myself an artist) is that I think moments like this and the reactions I have to them a part of what makes me a writer. There have been very few instances, if any, when I've intentionally thought "I'm going to write a story about this topic" and go from there. Usually it has more to do with noticing the weird little incongruous things that surround us every day, and considering them from a slightly different perspective.
Maybe someday one of those partial ideas related to that baseball will find an existence. There are a couple already swimming around in the soup of what my Big Secret Project is right now, so it isn't impossible. Not that even this means those ideas will ever come to any fruition, but they sure are interesting to play with and wonder about.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)