Cheese Grater
One of the hard lessons of becoming an adult is reconciling the many ways in which I was wrong about what it's like to become an adult. Most adults, I'd wager, have a similar pool from which to draw: "I thought that having a job would mean that I could buy whatever I want. I assumed my parents just had bad taste in stuff and that's why we used a VHS player until 2005." Okay, well, maybe that's a little too specific. Instead, it's more like, "I assumed that, once I was an adult, I would understand better how to navigate the world." Or, the inverse realization: "I can't believe that being an adult just means you make it up as you go." A specific instance of my naivete? Parenting. I went on my LDS mission to Miami, Florida. There, I learned Spanish and worked with the Hispanic population. In the locker-room-of-a-rec-center-swimming-pool-type-of-humidity, I met a lot of people. In between worrying about passing out from heat stroke and trying to figure out how to keep business cards from clumping together in my pocket when they'd absorbed too much sweat/humidity/there's no palpable difference, I spent plenty of time in people's homes. The majority of those homes were members'; they'd invite us over on a regular basis for dinner. Most nights we had a DA (dinner appointment, which we'd also call a cita, meaning (creatively) "appointment" in Spanish, because we were just effortlessly cool like that, y'know?) and that would involve showing up, fumbling through some rough Spanish, eating the meals (many of which were great), and then delivering a spiritual thought/message before heading into the inky post-shower-humidity to get some more work done ere we went to bed. Whilst at these member homes, we would get a chance to interact with their kids. Almost all of them were second-generation immigrants, their parents having come from Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Cuba, El Salvador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and basically every other Spanish-speaking country. I did, actually, meet a couple of Mexicans, too, but they tended to live in the deeper south than where I served, so my knowledge of Mexican culture and accents is sparse. Anyway, the kids were almost always bilingual, knowing English from school and friends and Spanish from parents. The parents almost always understood English, but preferred to speak in Spanish. For me, that was wonderful, as I felt I needed to expand my understanding of the language and become a better speaker before I left. Nevertheless, speaking Spanish (or any new language) is hard, and I appreciated having the kids to chat with in English more often than not. It was a nice reprieve. Regardless of their linguistic lineages, these wonderful members always carried a beautiful commitment to the cultures they'd had to leave behind when they came to America. Some of the people I got to know were political refugees, while others wanted to pursue different lives than what they had at home. But just because they left their countries didn't mean that their countries had left them. Their national varieties were a wonderful contribution to the texture of Miami, broadly speaking, and within the comparatively-insular culture of the Church. And, because of these differences, I was exposed to different philosophies of parenting--an unexpected aspect of my twenty-four month voluntary religious excursion for the denomination in which I'd been raised. One night--sometime near the Christmas season of 2002--I was at a member's home. I can't remember their name (we only ate there once, I think), so we'll call them la familia Casca. The Casca family had a handful of kids--probably at least three, though I may be misremembering. As we sat about the table, my missionary companion and I talking with the parents, the two younger children ran about the family room, which adjoined the dining/kitchen area. Much like there's a filter that you can put on your phone's photos in order to ditch red-eye, become sepia-toned (like it's old-fashioned!), or incorporate a dog's ears onto your head, Mormons have a noise-filter that they almost always use. Particularly when religious stuff is being discussed--one of the fastest ways to get a child below the age of five into an incoherent ball of fussy energy is to bring up spiritual concepts; they're allergic to it--kids tend to get louder. While the filter isn't perfect, and a certain level of child-generated chaos will eventually break through, it's of a separate quality from the typical parent-of-a-screaming-child filter that most parents have installed. I say this so that you understand that the kids in the family room began to scream. That is, we finally heard them screaming. Before, I said that the dining area and the kitchen and the family room all sort of blended together. The two younglings--I'd guess ages five and three--had drifted from the family room into the kitchen. Their laughter and shrieks were all part of the background, as unremarkable as, say, the color of the paint on the walls (white) or the material of the floor (tile--I say this not because I have a specific memory of the material of the floor, but because that's simply what it was; South Florida has no understanding of the concept of carpet in their homes, as if the collective dictionary by which the entirety of Miami-Dade County consults is bereft of the word). In short, we had completely tuned them, and their location out. That meant that when the shriek that broke through our filters was recognized for what it was, there was a possible danger to the shriek. I looked up in time to see the five year old sprint past me, his round face panicked and his eyes wide. I imagine he was running to his bedroom, the hallway being on my right-hand side, and I seem to recall having a brief thought of, "I wonder why he is running so fast." These are the kinds of mysteries that a non-parent-adult has the luxury to ponder. A non-parent can look at a particular behavior and mull it over, trying to figure out the ramifications of the choices being made. "I see that little Jimmy is intent on determining the flammability of the cat. This is likely to end in Jimmy learning a lot about the natural world, specifically the ways in which cats dislike being combusted. I shall mentally document the results of my observations and compare them to my hypothesis. The scientific method is wonderful." Parents don't have that opportunity. It's given up, along with their insurance information, at the moment they go into the hospital for their first delivery. (It's in the fine-print.) Parent-adults see a problem, intervene, then, post-hoc, justify their behavior. "Well, of course I took away your dart gun. You…maybe…might have shot…at this fragile mug of cold tea that I, as a responsible adult, have left on the counter for the last six days!" So I had the chance to really puzzle at what this five year old could be fleeing from. After all, this flight-of-fight response was something I recognized based upon the occasional encounter with an angry dog on the other side of the fence or a Jehovah's Witness. But this kid was five! He won't be harangued for "selling Jesus!" or given the Cuban finger at his knock on the door for another thirteen years! How could he know what it takes to be scared and running for his life? Okay, so maybe I didn't contemplate all of that at the time. To be really honest, I likely thought something significantly less impressive, like, "Huh. Weird." And the really galling thing is, I probably didn't even think it in Spanish. As the five year old peeled past me, I became aware of a high-pitched, demoniacal cackle that I have since learned is not an environmentally-bequeathed sound, but is instead an innate sound that all children who can't yet formulate complete sentences can muster. It is the sound of joy at the misery of another. The basest human impulses--the laughing-when-someone-falls-down impulse, the shut-the-door-on-someone-running-to-catch-the-elevator impulse, the smash-the-bug-because-it's-there-not-because-it's-poisonous-I-mean-it's-just-an-ant-for-crying-out-loud impulse. It's the laughter of someone doing something mean just to be mean. It's the sound of a child who knows that he can't possibly be blamed for this because he's just a kid, Mom, so he doesn't understand, not really. But that's the part of the laughter that he has, the part that's lurking right beneath the surface--the Pennywise part of the laugh, if you will. Because he knows he shouldn't, and he knows he won't get blamed. That's what he's laughing at. In Mormon scripture, Alma claims that "wickedness never was happiness". Alma, I submit, had not encountered a three year old who had uttered that laugh. Because that's a kid who is ecstatic in his wickedness. The three year old rounded into view, his laughter peeling through the filter even better than his brother's scream. A joyous light was in his eyes. A grin that put the smiles of every Christmas morning to shame stretched across his face. Above his head, one pudgy fist clutching the handle with all the ferocity of possession, he held a cheese grater. Not one of those wimpy, flat-and-unimpressive types that seem to come from the store with tarnish on them. No, this was one of the gleaming kinds--the type that Shredder would look at and say, "Steady on, that's a bit much." Gaps, grooves, edges, holes--everything shimmered with a devilish glint, each a mouth eager to take a gleeful chunk out of whatever it was close to. In this case, it was the five year old brother. And here's the thing: I didn't get up to stop the kid. At least, not at first. No, instead I luxuriated in that precious non-parent-"adult" (I was, myself, only nineteen) indulgence of thinking before acting. I thought, I bet his parents let him play with that. I'd better not interfere. After all, I wouldn't want a stranger--even if it were a scrawny kid from the other side of the country whose arm was so thin you could put a rubber band around the bicep and still have slack--coming into my home and telling my kid how he ought to live. The audacity of such a behavior was repugnant. Do unto others as you would have done unto you, that was my missionary motto. "Uh…" said my companion, who was (read: is) a better person than I, "¿Hermana?" Since we're brothers and sisters in the Church, we called the adult women (regardless of their parental status, though most of them were mothers) "Hermana", which means "sister" in Spanish. It gets vague here. I'd like to think that my companion's words snapped me out of my smug self-assurance, pulling me into the real danger that the five year old kid was in, and that I leapt forward and snatched the cheese grater. Maybe I was the one who said, "Uh, ¿Hermana?" and it was my companion who saved the day. Maybe the tentative question, complete with correctly inverted question marks, was enough to get one of the parents to recognize the danger and intervene appropriately. Whatever the case was, the three year old's cheese grater was confiscated before he could do any harm. The kid then promptly burst into tears. I feel worn out, like a sponge hand-wrung
With all the enthusiasm of anxiety, Tired beyond the behind-the-eyes drag That strikes when there have been only Two nights of poor sleep deep and yet I can't quite get my feet firmly under me. It's the exhaustion of running on rollers, The electrified-wire balancing act of Trying to balance the weight of the words I never say to the fears that I never face And the gravity of gravity, with the Abyss of mystery spread out as welcoming As a prodigal return, vast and nonjudgmental Below my feet. It is the fuel that engines My insomnia, this feeling of understanding only That I don't understand. It is the mire of the Quicksand dreams, those night-terrors of drowning In all of this air we have to live in, yet I'm stuck, My arms limp as flags on a breathless afternoon, Desperate to pull myself to safety. But there are no plateaus where I can catch my Spritely breath, which runs away with laughter And all I meant to say, leaving me suffocated and Mute--these would-be havens that I would as soon Heave myself into, hoping to make this home a heaven Are phantasms of finicky desire and the insubstantial Ghosts of promises never uttered, only inferred. Trawling through the oceans' rise onto the land of the free, My raft of good-intentions springing leaks of reality. I try to bail us out, but I'm not a bank; I'm small enough to fail And when I fall, I'm small enough to not make a ripple In the water. The waves will efface what I'd hoped would never Be erased; a Me-shaped hole in the world is patched over Faster than the speed of light-coming-through-the-gap. I navigate a world in which I am to learn that Mendacity is heralded as marvelous; it becomes the Audacity that I once hoped would make this place Safe. I don't talk about video games much around here, in part because I'm rusty, but also because I have other things to discuss, but I've been pushing through some of the lingering titles in my library. This is partly because Christmas is coming, and aside from the geese getting fat, I'm also likely to get a new game (maybe two?) and I dislike having unfinished games sitting around. Considering it's me, that's a touch hypocritical; I have so many unfinished--or completely unread--books sitting on my shelf, I could probably set up an entire year's worth of reading without having to go to a bookstore once. (But what's the fun in that?) Nevertheless, I'm running through games pretty quickly right now. I replayed Batman: Arkham Knight and, though I didn't do any of the sidequests--staying focused on the main story arch instead--I enjoyed my second pass through Gotham. I had put down Shadow of Mordor when what felt like a second map opened up. I wasn't interested in slashing my way through another mass of orcs, so I set it aside. Having finished Batman, I figured playing the Lord of the Rings clone of the Arkham series would be worthwhile. It was. While I'd lost a lot of the story momentum by having about a year between when I last played it and now, I still enjoyed the game and managed to finish it off with a few nights' work. I also finished Mass Effect: Andromeda, which had an emotionally satisfying ending, even if the game was getting too repetitive by the end. I didn't max out much, nor did I pursue all of the backstory elements that are possible, which was a deliberate choice: I was trying to get through the main story. This, too, had been a title I picked up and then set down for some months--mostly because of Overwatch, which is a different topic altogether--and I'm glad I finished it. There were some flaws with it, but, all in all, a solid game. That brings me to my current slash-fest, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. It's a slightly older entry, but it's something that I have been enjoying quite a bit. See, I've been playing the Assassin's Creed games since the first one came out on the PlayStation 3. In fact, it was the first game we bought for the system. I played through the whole thing, a bit dismayed by the two storylines that it was trying to tell, but enjoying it for what it was. By the time I was on the sixth or seventh assassination, however, I was feeling like there wasn't much to the world. When its trilogy sequels came out, I played them all--and burned out as a result. I mean, the games were about what they always had been. Yes, there were new features and new things that I could do, but the morality of the story that was being told continued to rankle me--just a little bit--as the games unfolded. Add to that the fact that my saturation limit for "Ooh, I'm climbing on [fill in any famous European building]! That's so cool!" had been met partway through ACII and I was going through the story just because that's what I was doing. Almost out of a sense of duty, I picked up a copy of Assassin's Creed III. The game takes place in colonial America, with a Native American protagonist, and while I liked both the idea and the avatar, I couldn't get a lot of momentum with the game. It was…well, they're all the same. The DNA of an Assassin's Creed game varies very little. It's now to the point that the games are less about continuing a grand, overarching storyline and more about giving a bunch of different choices to do similar things, but in sundry places. Would you like to shiv someone in front of the Sphinx? AC: Origins is your best bet. Want to use tomahawks instead of knives? ACIII is the one for you. French Revolution (which should've been amazing but was so riddled with bugs and bad press that I didn't even give it a chance)? Yeah, Unity can scratch that itch. I'm on the cusp of finishing Assassin's Creed: Syndicate (I do appreciate that they've given up on the Roman numeral system, though; it was looking so gauche), and the flavor of this one is right up my (crowded) alley: London. More specifically, the mid-Victorian era--height of the Industrial Revolution--when this story takes place. Because of my unnerving obsession with all things English, this one was a guaranteed buy (though we waited for the price to drop before scooping up a copy). And while the time period is not my favorite (by a long shot), getting to "see" Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, the Monument, and St. Paul's Cathedral again was delightful. Listening to the accents, running down the streets--it was very immersive and enjoyable to me on a personal level. But what struck me as worth noting was the way that the story worked. Now, all sandbox games have problems with keeping the story cohesive. When you can delay whatever pressing, high-stakes problem the main plot is trying to push on you in order to scour the city for treasure chests, there's a disconnect between the story and the action. "Hurry to the bank!" but you can take literal hours of sidequests before arriving--and everyone is as breathless as if you'd sprinted straight there. Admittedly, RPGs in general have this potential problem--from the Final Fantasy games through Mass Effect--because it's a matter of figuring out how to split the difference between wide, diverse fun and specific, narrow narrative. What AC:S does surprisingly well, is it makes sure that (most) of the things that you do help your character move toward the game's overriding goal of gutting a guy named Starrick. Because the major story can't advance until you've pushed through some of the boroughs of London and reclaimed them for the "good guys", whenever you complete one of these minor missions, there's a sense of getting one step closer to the bad guy. Unlike in novels, where it's easy to fall into the trap of the antagonist's plan being more interesting than the protagonist's response to it (active versus reactive characters), games like AC:S flip the roles. As the protagonists (you play as both Jakob and Evie Frye, and, since you can usually choose which one to be during much of the game, I picked Evie), you are doing things--accomplishing goals, finding allies, forging alliances, and completing necessary missions in order to further that larger goal. The bad guy, meanwhile, sits in his office and gets angry that things aren't going well for him. This is a refreshing change. Even Batman: Arkham Knight suffers from the question of "Why is the Scarecrow's plan waiting around for Batman to thwart?" Despite being a really interesting game, Batman reacts to almost everything. It's rare for him to be the one springing the trap or laying down a scheme. Now, this isn't to say that the game isn't without its flaws; bugs abound (as is common for an AC game), and there are many times when I was bored silly with having to do the same two or three variations on the "kill some people, kill a specific person, move on" formula. That's part of the reason that I left the game alone for a while. Nevertheless, getting a chance to revisit it has been quite enjoyable. As I haven't quite finished it yet, I don't know how it ends. We'll see if it manages to seal off its primary* story well or not. -----
Over the past month, I've been working on a new novel for NaNoWriMo. Putting out 1,667 words a day over the course of the month is mentally exhausting--especially since I almost never only wrote that many. As a result, I didn't want to also throw down however many additional words in my daily essays, though I did toss out a short one part way through the month.
Because of this "negligence", I have a backlog of topics that I want to write about: Some thoughts on books I finished reading (The Shining, by Stephen King; We Were Feminists Once, by Andi Zeisler; Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris; and 10 Books that Screwed Up The World, by Benjamin Wiker), a bit about both Thor: Ragnorok and Justice League, as well as some feelings about recent political events. However, because of time, I'm going to focus on my NaNoWriMo debrief, as I had some specific goals that I wanted to accomplish with this book, and it's good for me to reflect on what I've written. (Note, that doesn't mean it's good for me to edit what I've written. I mean, it is good for me, but I still don't like doing it.) Words, Words, Words Before my non-fiction hiatus started, I showed off my graph of monthly output. At this point (still five writing days from the end of the month), I have almost 60,000 words down. Part of this is to be expected: I wrote a novel that consisted of 55,000 words. But I was also more inclusive of what I consider writing--inasmuch as it's possible, I counted my words. Note cards for planning the novel; notes scribbled on a yellow legal pad whilst in a meeting; ruminations during church that involved me jotting down ideas. All of it combined to add to the total. I'm confident that, were I to have done the same thing in October, the number would have been significantly higher. October, then, is not so much a baseline as a "work-out-the-kinks" kind of month. As I'm looking at my current output versus the previous month's, however, I can see that one thing I don't do is write long form non-fiction. While I had some days that were in the low thousand range, I rarely hit the mid- to high thousand, and only once topped 2,000 words once--and, technically, since it was a music video essay, I didn't even write all of the words. In contrast, my daily output for November was, with one exception, over 1,600 words. That's easily double for a number of my October days. NaNoWriMo definitely helped me to push deeper into my writing, to commit to more focus and more time. Now, the data are what the data are, but what I choose to let it mean to me is less clear. One thing that this sort of analysis does for me is it helps me to feel productive. When I'm in the midst of writing, tapping out bizarre patterns on my keyboard, it can feel intangible and remote. They're words on the screen, yes, but they aren't necessarily doing anything. I think that's a big reason why I love my writer group--it gives me some sort of validation about what I've done. I also think that's why I publish these unpolished essays: Putting the words out there solidifies them, even if they remain purely digital. Lastly, I believe that counting them helps to quantify what is really an unquantifiable process. While I can't measure the quality of the words that I've written, I can at least measure the quantity. Some of the words are good and worth keeping. Others…less so. But they're a demonstration of my work, and that's worthwhile. Goals Made Are Goals Achieved Because I'm counting words, and I'm a fast enough writer to finish a daily NaNoWriMo minimum in an hour, I decided that I would try to do something different this year. I can write pretty fast--according to my records, my fastest hour was from 3:30pm to 4:30pm on 14 June 2017. I wrote 2,530 words. I wanted to write more. Now, technically, my goal is to one day double that speed, but I don't know if my fingers can actually move fast enough to generate 5,000 words in an hour. And it's not the sort of thing that I can do overnight. So I decided to stretch for something that I've never done before: Write 3,000 words in an hour. One of the reasons this is difficult to do is because I no longer write chapters that are of that length. When I was writing Writ in Blood, I would drop between three- and five thousand words per chapter on the reg, but since I realized that my group preferred to have shorter chapters, I've started settling on shorter amounts. This has had the unexpected advantage of helping me with pacing, as my chapters are now more uniform in length. I've almost come to the position that a chapter is the length of a fifty minute writing session (the amount of time I have in a class period), which means that if I want longer chapters, I need to write faster. Enter my goal. I picked 3,000 because it seemed like a stretch and something attainable. That meant that I had to write with complete focus for the full sixty minutes, or else I wouldn't meet my goal. When I finally got it (on 24 November 2017, for those curious readers out there), I did so because of that focus. I remember thinking that I had to remain fixated on my fingers, pushing to get more ideas, more descriptions, more dialogue onto the page. When I finished--even with a tiny break when I had to take care of a home issue--I was sitting at 3,176 words written in fifty-eight minutes. I have to admit, I'm pretty proud of it. Form and Function I decided to try the four-corner morality that John Truby describes in his book, The Anatomy of Story. It's used in the movie Batman Begins, and I thought it might be interesting to try it out. For the most part, I think it worked pretty well. I actually felt that the end resolution of the story--the penultimate chapter--was satisfying and exciting. On the down side, the idea of writing to a formula is distasteful to me. I guess that makes it feel like I'm not really contributing--simply plugging in new characters into an equation. Then again, I likely am already writing to a formula, I simply don't know it. I mean, three acts, five acts, seven acts--whatever the formula is, there's a chance that my stories naturally adhere to them. I've been immersed in narrative since I first read Green Eggs and Ham--heck, even before that, in the form of TV and movies I watched. So telling stories is something that I've done for almost my entire life. And the idea that I've absorbed so many narratives and they haven't grown into my DNA somehow (metaphorically, of course) is probably naïve. At any rate, Truby's book is making me think a lot harder about my own stories, and maybe that's a reason for this next part… Final Thoughts Writing is something that I'm really committed to, which is perhaps why it's so frustrating for me that I haven't been able to do anything more than publish a blog and crank out novels of middling quality. I truly think that I need to do the same amount of focus and effort on my editing game, or else I'm never going to move forward. So, though I'm going to keep writing my essays, I think I will use more time to edit and rewrite. I've finally hit the point in my life where I can no longer ignore the fact that I need to improve my editing. I may be a writer, but if I'm not an editor, too, I'll never be an author. I have to face and conquer this flaw in my process. Wish me luck. My youngest son is four. Despite his foot-stomping insistence that he no longer needs a nap, he's a pro at snoozing in his five-point car seat, often providing a childish descant to the car's normal hum by the time we get home. Since my commute takes a half hour, it isn't a surprise that this happens to him--I've been pretty close to closing my eyes on the trip m'self. If he naps while at Grandma's house, he doesn't check out, but any time he misses the mid-day sack-time, he's unconscious before we roll into the garage.
This gives me a chance to do something that I have always loved doing: I get to pick him up and carry him inside, his soft snores on my neck, and tuck him into bed where he can finish out his nap. All three of my boys did the same thing at this age: They'd stick their butts out, sitting on my arm like a shelf, then contentedly shove their hands in front of them and between their legs. Then they'd nuzzle into my shoulder as I carried them inside. There, I would work free their Velcro shoes and, on the trickier days, their jackets or coats, hauling them to their room. More often than not, they'd stay asleep. My four year old is a champion at this, and I don't know of a time when he's woken up during this transfer. Today, as I got to do this small, parental ritual, it struck me again the observation that I once saw but can't credit: There comes a day in every mother's life when she puts her baby down and never picks him up again. That idea has been rattling around my mind. While my oldest (now ten and a half) still does hugs and is a very affectionate child, my times of carrying him have ceased. Considering all that happened in his early life--frantic surgeries; long, quiet nights of worrisome watching; desperate fretting over the smallest sniffle or rib-cracking cough--I couldn't focus on a future when he would carry himself. The now of the parenting was the only thing I could understand. Beyond that was too much uncertainty. My second son has his entire heart, so I know I didn't worry about him the same way. But I only pick him up to wrestle, to play, never to kiss and tuck in and allow to sleep away some of the afternoon. It's only been seven years since he first came to us, and I've already put him down forever. Realizing the inevitability of my youngest son's growth, his eventual rejection of naps, and the real end to the babyhood he represents has been a difficult one to fathom. I've been a dad for ten years now, and though I always tried to relish my sleeping children and the rare opportunity to hold them as they slept, I struggle with the fact that I will one day--and one day soon--have to let that go. I, like countless fathers before me, will have to put down my son and never pick him up again. And that makes me sad. |
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