This Confession Has Meant Nothing

Forgive me. I'm still not feeling very funny. Maybe I'll have some better stuff closer to New Years.

I just watched American Psycho again and it got me thinking. Not about the directly correlated stuff like vapid materialism and lust and rejection of core humanity either. Instead, I ended wondering about how to convey a story like this without the blood.

Well, of course it's possible, but I guess I should ask; Is it possible to convey an interesting story like this without the blood?

Everyone knows the phrase, "Who, What, Where, When, and Why". It's the foundation of storytelling. Different types of stories focus on different components. Your more popular fiction is pretty centered on the What. What happened, the story, the plot. The more literary stuff coasts between the Who and the Why. These are the stories that bore the hell out of people because, generally speaking, no one cares that Rosebud was a damn sled. The Where and When are really more details. They can definitely be important details, but they aren't the core of the story.

So, continuing to reframe my question; If you've got your Who and Why, your Patrick Bateman as the sociopathic golem driven by everything that was wrong with 80's America. That's a great Who and Why, but no one's going to read about his fastidious morning beauty ritual alone, at least no one who doesn't bring a MacBook to Starbucks. That's where the What comes in. An engaging, and maybe a little outrageous, What can sell stories, so why not bolt some titillating story onto your beatifully crafted Who and Why?

Bottom line, I think it is possible to create a more prosaic What and still sell your Why and Who, but it's pretty damned hard. Lost in Translation is a good example of this. Great Why and Who, kind of a boring What though really. Still, the Why and Who were so well crafted and the slow What was both well made and 100% supportive of the theme, that it still achieved some popularity.

I'm pretty sure it made less money than Titanic though.

Run Ning! Run!

I'm doing something dumb, which is hardly unusual. At least this time it doesn't involve power tools or the local electric-grid.

I'm making Ning run. Not through chasing her or anything, but that's not off the table. I've gotten a little concerned about her bones lately. See, she eats well, better than I do really, but her calcium +D intake might be a little low. Combine that with the fact that she's been cooped up at home with the kids for a while now, and you get a lack of stress on those bones. Bones are like muscles, they get stronger when you use them. Interesting little fact, "The dominant arm of a tennis player has 35 percent more bone than the non-dominant arm" (MSNBC). That and all the general benefits of a healthy level of activity pushed me into starting her on running.

So why is this dumb? Well, making someone exercise is something that's almost always doomed to failure. Most people who start exercising do it because they want to look better in a bikini, god knows that's why I did it. That's kind of a tricky thing though. It's like wanting a sports car. Most people are going to go buy one, but some guys with the right background are going to build one from scratch. Building a car is a long process that some people will enjoy and most people will dislike and see only as a chore. Here's the rub, you can't buy fitness. The only way to get it is to put in hours of hard and mostly painful effort.

Unless you actually enjoy exercising, then you need an extraordinary level of discipline to slog through it.

What I'm gambling on is that I can tap into something that will hook her and keep her going on her own. Competition, achievement, hell even habit can work.

I Bring Nothing to the Table

The holidays drastically reduce my net weekly output of "The Funny". So my apologies for that.

Here's a poorly spaced sign instead.

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last?

Daughter has started to fear things. She'll grab my hand and hold it in front of her face if any scary parts come up on one of her dvds. Now, the 'scary' is relative of course, so I'm often shielding her from something like an ogre doll in Little Einsteins.

It makes me wonder how she processes fear at this age. She hasn't exactly had anything happen to be scared of, so it's strange how she can associate these things with fear. I know she has nightmares, but I really wonder what happens in them.

Saint Mikey the Slightly Dented

I've been busier than usual lately. Standard workload for the normal job, and I've got a pretty full load of contracts on the side. I've managed to mostly keep up with training, though swimming is way behind.

Christmas is coming fast, and, thankfully, Thanksgiving is behind us (see what I did there?). I don't like the holidays very much at all, but with Daughter and Son around I'm trying to do a good job of hiding that. They'll probably see through the act when they're older, but by then it won't be as big of a deal for them.

It's kind of hard for me to put together something cohesive right now with how fragmented my focus is. So, hopefully throwing out this grab-bag crap of a post will help clear out the pipes.

In Which I Express Surprising Hatred for Common Things

The alphabet pisses me off.

I realize that this statement might need a little more explanation than most of my random declarations, so first, some background.

I have kind of an arms-length relationship with reality. The world that exists in my head is a nifty place, full of well-formed theories and concepts that aren’t sullied by all that nastiness that floats around the real world. Try sending me grocery shopping for a good example of this. You want me to get eggs and milk. Those are what I consider ‘implementation details’. In my head I’m going to the store to get ‘food’. So when I come back with a sandwich no one should be surprised. That’s if I even manage to make it to the store without forgetting where I’m going and autopiloting to work.

Concepts are obviously a big deal to me, so things get a little sticky when certain concepts are implemented poorly in reality. For example, the horror that is the English alphabet. See, an alphabet is supposed to be a way to break down phonetic components of language to allow for transcription. The English alphabet technically does this, but that’s like saying that a drunk guy pissing on your lawn is fulfilling the responsibilities of a sprinkler system.

The letter C is a great example. It makes a sound like K or sometimes, for no appreciable reason, it sounds like S.

So why in the name of all that’s holy do we have the letter C at all? USE K OR S DAMNIT!

I get angry thinking about vowel ambiguity and the ‘silent e’ pisses me off to no fucking end. I remember very little of my childhood, but I know I learned to read pretty early, so I think that might have spared my kindergarten teacher being yelled at by a swearing five year old about conceptual clarity. Since then, I never really gave it much thought except when I’d typo an ill-constructed word and the rage would briefly flare back up. But now that we have two kids I’ve had to teach Daughter this abomination and I’ll be taking Son through it soon. When I was teaching Daughter phonics, I’d have to stop and explain that C says Kuh or Ess because somewhere along the line an idiot was put in charge of something that they shouldn’t have been.

I use that as an important life-lesson for her.

She’ll have fun with her teachers.

So will I.

I Can Do a Thousand Now

In case you haven't noticed, and no one really has, I've generally focused my melancholy, laser like, onto punishing my body through constant exercise.

So this leads to some delicious irony when I say that I'm in the best shape of my life.


Side note, you might notice a large gap between this and the prior post. Well I was in another country with a slightly authoritative bent, and blogspot access is a no-no. On the plus side, I did start Daughter in on minor harassment of the local authorities.