Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Eternal Simultaneity's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
11:28 am	hive mind what makes us different from our closest mammalian cousins? what attributes contributed most tellingly to our divergence from all other primates? i've always found this question interesting, and there are all sorts of interesting attempts at answers. i just stumbled onto a new one in the new york times that gave me one of those galvanizing, gestalt flights of evolutionary story-telling imagination that are such a kick. researchers have shown (arguably) that humans are innately helpful. as young as twelve or eighteen months, they will help out an unrelated adult, opening a door, picking up a clothespin, pointing out a lost object, all absent any form of reward or outside compulsion. then, as they get older, they begin to evince something a dr. tomasello refers to as 'shared intentionality'. children, around three years old, begin to learn rules of social norms and not only follow them, but enforce them. "If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously." baby chimps have been shown to evince some of the altruistic instincts shown by human infants, but they seem to lack this 'shared intentionality' almost completely. they "seem to have little interest in what may be [in] their companions' minds". that last sentence gives me the shivers a little. the implication being that what makes humans different is that they do have interest in what is in their companions' minds, that they somehow line up their minds. "A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures to form goals and coordinate activities". i'm imagining a group of proto-humans moving in tandem, vocalizing in crude harmony with mirrored gestures, working together to take down an animal of prey, or a neighboring competitive group. hive mind. constituent members giving up some portion of their will to the good of the group, some portion of control over their actions to the will of society. the persistence of so-called 'mob mentality', surviving so robustly even this far into our social and mental evolution, makes perfect sense if this article is correct about the fundamental importance of this concept in what goes to make us uniquely human. hierarchical organization structures, from the military to the school room to the corporate world, make sense, the peons marching in lock-step. this idea works with the remarkable development of language, accounting for why humans could be expected to achieve a complexity of language far beyond anything else found in nature (that we know of, obviously). the ability to render thoughts into communicable packets of sound, to allow, basically, thought-transfer in near real-time. heavy duty, dude. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 27th, 2009
10:00 am	the marathon continues ( holy crap this turned into a long post ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
10:22 am	vocal jazz the seattle jazz singers did a gig last night at roosevelt high school, my alma mater. roosevelt went on first, the latest incarnation of the first vocal jazz group i was ever in. i had a good talk with scott brown, both before and after the show. it's weird, but it felt like the first time he's recognized me since graduation. i've run into him a few times since then, at various shows over the years, but he's always given me that distant sort of hand shake and 'hi there' that means either 'i don't actually know you' or 'i don't really like you'. i always rather hoped it was more the former than the latter, and judging by last night that has indeed been the case. anyways, that was nice, to reconnect with him. he was the one, after all, who got me into jazz. dave cross, whom i sang for at the uw, was there. dave barduhn, sort of a vocal jazz luminary, was there with his group genesis. the show was roosevelt, genesis, and then us: a quality high school group, one of the best college groups in the country, and an adult, semi-professional group. it was a pretty neat show. i had a good time. afterwards i went to teddy's for a beer with louise, ginger, and marshall. it was crazy being back at my old high school. in the past ten years they gutted the building and completely remodeled. the place looks fantastic. i'll admit to a twinge of envy. the theater now is really incredible, everything is so much nicer than it was when i was there. back then, in the nineties, one of the previous classes had painted that robert frost poem, nothing gold can stay, onto the front steps. our high school colors are green and gold, so it made good sense superficially. it also makes a deeper, melancholy sense with respect to high school, and youth more generally, when you look at the whole poem. last night as i was walking up the front steps i noticed that the old paint was gone, and i felt sad that that poem wasn't the first thing to greet you anymore upon walking up to the school. then, as i got to the top of the stairs, i saw that, rather than doing away with the poem, they merely did away with the rough paint job. it is now set into the concrete itself in classy script. as soon as i saw it i was hit with a wave of sentimentality, and had to fight back tears. funny how that happens sometimes. Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
2:46 pm	sarah palin is one smart cookie the quote, stunning in its simplicity: "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?" how come, indeed? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
9:36 am	sleeeeep man i'm tired. this past weekend i was short on sleep all three nights. friday night up till all hours, then up watching football. kelly and i checked out bleachers, our local sports bar, for some tasty sandwiches, pbr with lime, and an extremely depressing second half of the husky football game. the beavers, who seem to be dominating the pac 10 this year, walked all over our boys. oh well. saturday night was another all hours, i think we got home after five. then i got up early sunday to go watch tyler race cyclocross. that was pretty sweet, walking around in the rain in woodland park. it actually was pretty fun, all sarcasm aside. met up with erin, tyler's new girlfriend, and her cute dog frankie. i was on my bike, and tyler and i went by sully's after the race for a couple of beers and some football. then it was hurry home to leave for jazz singers rehearsal. but first we gave meow meow subcutaneous fluids, which, unsurprisingly, is a not terribly pleasant procedure. poor kelly was shaking like a leaf trying to jab that enormous needle into the kitty's neck skin. :( rehearsal was pretty fun. full band, with horns and sound system. we're working on our christmas music, the concert's on december 4th, should be a good show. we do this sweet arrangement of o holy night the piano player wrote, in latin (the beat, not the language), and i nipped around to the congas during the solo section, just messin around, and it was a lot of fun. got a good reaction from the drummer, and when i tried to go back to the choir after the solo section, frank told me to go back and keep playing. heh heh. pretty sweet. then i went home, showered, and rode down to ballard for open mic. played a good set, sounded good. did a couple dave songs with super intricate guitar parts and debuted mary jane's last dance. that's a fun one. and talked to one of the regulars, malawaina, about having her sing some harmony next week on a few songs. she's got a really pretty voice, i'm looking forward to it. we'll be doing the stone, pay for what you get, and jimi thing. i'll also be running the show next week, josiah's busy, so that's always fun. last night kelly had rehearsal so i went out to write. my table was taken at the tin hat so i went to what is becoming my new spot, the reading gaol. great name. made some good progress, and then rode back up to greenwood to meet friends at naked city. after standing forlornly at the packed bar for a while, i nipped next door to the crosswalk and had a couple pabsts and wrote for another half hour. ended up making a really interesting connection between my two unrelated antagonists, and set the stage for a revelation from two different quarters. i'm really looking forward to finding out what the hell ends up happening. then i felt guilty so i went back to naked city. kelly came by after rehearsal and we all had a good time talking and laughing and drinking. met a cool couple who was apparently at our halloween party, though somehow i've never seen them before. funny how that happens. so yeah. i'm tired. one of these days i really want to just sleep and sleep and sleep. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
10:43 am	Bush to Develop Think Tank *snicker (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
10:04 am	post-modern relationship mores i brought a few slices of cold, left-over frozen pizza in to work for breakfast this morning. our operations manager walked by my desk, saw it, and said, laughingly, 'now that's bachelor fare right there.' i laughed and said, 'well, yeah. i'm married, but...' he checked his step, looked back, and said, 'oh. so your wife sends you to work with cold pizza?' i had to stop and mentally process for a second. my wife sends me to work...? then it clicked. i laughed inside. no, buddy. my wife doesn't 'send me to work' with anything. hee hee. i should tell her to get in the kitchen and make me a damn lunch, woman. :D ____________ edited: although, in all fairness, she did pour me a travel cup of coffee this morning. tuesdays are pretty sweet: she wakes up before me and makes coffee. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
2:01 pm	favorite headline of the day: "White House: Crist Loved Obama Stimulation" eesh, nice word choice, guys. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
9:05 am	ah, glorious tuesday so we had a halloween party this past weekend. i tied one on. i actually tied two or three on. the following day was a late family lunch at my sister's, and if it hadn't been for daylight savings, fall back, i'm not sure i'd've made it. it would have been more difficult, anyways. then, that night, i rode down to the conor byrne for open mic. i don't know, i guess i'm just a glutton for punishment. i'm feeling a lot better now, after having an early night last night, and lots of sleep. tonight kelly has esoterics rehearsal, so i'm planning to go out and get some writing done. i haven't written a word in maybe two weeks, maybe longer. it's hard to keep track. working full time, with a family at home, and being strangely unable to write in my own house, it's really tough to find the time. the last time i wrote i found the story taking a rather dark left turn. it's the beginning of the third act, so, if that's what i want, now is the time to do it. i'm a little worried that it's too much of a departure from the tone thus far, but i'm keeping faith. there are dark undercurrents in the first two thirds, and indeed a scene toward the beginning that is definitely in that line. the fact that the narrative veers off into the less unpleasant for most of the first and second acts should be okay. in fact, the more i explain it, the more i like it. i certainly don't want to end up with a fluff piece. i may write trashy romance novels, but never without a streak of mean. being back at work, however much it might be interfering with my writing, is a relief. i find that i like having a job. it gives life structure, meaning. it can be hard to fill a day otherwise, and i like the feeling of knowing that i've spent the day earning a paycheck. speaking of which, break time's over. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
6:03 pm	this is pretty awesome just posted as a comment on a seattle pi article: 'This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration. 'At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school. 'After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny [sic] house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department. 'I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right."' (Comment on this)
12:44 am	feet feet are important. have you ever noticed how ticklish you are on the bottom of your feet? i used to wonder why the bottoms of my feet were so ticklish, until i realized how important the bottom of one's feet are to one's survival, evolutionarily speaking. if you're a hunter/gatherer, you're pretty much dead without your feet. any serious injury to the bottoms of your feet is, potentially, a death sentence. evolutionarily speaking. if you can't run around, you can't chase down food. you can't avoid predators. your feet are incredibly important. when i was in new york this past june i had a foot problem that i believe i detailed here. we were walking through central park when i suddenly couldn't walk any more. kelly ended up buying me crutches, i ended up hobbling my ass around manhattan, it was a big pain in the ass. when i got back to seattle i took my unemployed ass to the clinic and got some X-rays done, the final results of which were that there was no bone breakage. basically there was no real reason, medically speaking, for my foot to have hurt so bad that i had to hobble my ass around manhattan. such is life, and i've taken it in stride. i've since attributed the pain, after consultation with my bartender sully, to a pair of shoes that, my best guess is, push against that bone in a not-so-awesome way. the point of this post is that i think i'm dealing with yet another foot issue. i've been working again for the past few weeks, and i've been wearing my nice black shoes every day. i've discovered that they have a...dip, interestingly right where the offending brown shoes had a rise. the same foot, the left, has been giving me fits, but in a completely different way. instead of feeling like the outer bone of that foot is pressed in, it's been feeling like it is sagging out. i'll get home from work, take off my nice black shoes, and that outer bone will press into the floor before any other part of my foot. the heel of that foot has developed some sort of vague pain, and the entire foot in general has become uncomfortable. today i wore a different pair of shoes to work, and all of these pains and discomforts have disappeared. i reached into my nice black shoes last night and discovered that there is a dip on the left foot on the outside, right where that same bone, the same bone that gave me so many fits in manhattan, rests. so today i wore different shoes and suddenly everything seems to be okay. the moral of this story is to watch out for your shoes. this is all i can say. shoes can seem innocuous, but they can fuck your shit up. if you suddenly find that your business is all sorts of fucked up, take a long, hard look at your shoes. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
4:36 pm	oh jesus it might be time to buy a gun and move to the woods. the barbarians aren't at the gates. they own the damn gates. this article is depressing, scary, shocking, but ultimately not terribly surprising. (Comment on this)
8:59 am	sheepish mini-post all right, so i know it's been a while since i've posted. i've gotten a job, i'm working (thank god), lots of stuff been going down, and i haven't chronicled it at all. it's a crime, the sheer volume of minutiae slipping into the ether, never to be apathetically tolerated by my ambivalent readers. but anyways, i just had to post about this idea that i've seen a couple of articles about recently, namely that the reason the cern reactor is having so much trouble getting going is because nature abhors a higgs boson. the idea, put forth by some eminently respectable physicists (which term, since einstein, has become roughly equivalent with gentle, well-spoken wacko), is that all the time lines that contain the cern reactor producing a higgs boson are...avoided? it's harder to imagine when you come from the many worlds thesis. but if you think about our particular time line, the idea is that any future creation of the higgs boson will be shrugged aside by nature, sending a ripple back through time to avoid that future. fuckin trippy, right? see the part about physicist = wacko. i love these guys. holger bech nielsen and masao ninomiya. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 5th, 2009
11:35 am	autism and evolution there is a fairly well supported theory floating around right now that human evolution has accelerated recently. say, in the last ten thousand years. and even that the acceleration is accelerating. this goes against one possible intuition, namely that since humans have become so adept at manipulating their environment, the mechanism of natural selection would lose much of its grip on our genome, thereby slowing down evolution, possibly to a stand still. but it turns out that the data do not support this intuition. genetic research shows that an inordinately large number of our alleles are surprisingly young, on an evolutionary time-scale, implying that genetic change is happening more quickly now, not less quickly. i won't go into any of the theories as to why this might be, but i find that this prospect, that evolution is accelerating, both makes a sort of intuitive sense to me and is deeply exciting, from an anthropological standpoint. where will we go? what changes await? i'm just sorry i will only be alive for another sixty or seventy years (hopefully), and thus will almost certainly not see much in the way of substantive speciation. however, it is not at all unreasonable to look around us today and ask whether we are seeing the beginnings of any major changes. which brings me to autism. i find it very likely that there are potential avenues of evolution that are purely mental, indeed that our minds provide the most fertile ground for major change. the human brain is unique (as far as we know) in the history of evolution in certain crucial ways (size, power, contribution to survival), and it is also incredibly recent. evolution has had barely any time at all to tinker with the modern human mind, and if this idea that the rate of human evolution is accelerating faster and faster is true, then i don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect changes in the capacity and potential of the human mind that we currently can't imagine, or at the least would have trouble taking seriously. one of the hallmarks of major historical speciations, i would guess, would be messy beginnings. imagine the first legs. some little snaky dude with awkward, floppy, vestigial-looking nubs poking out of its side. imagine his contemporaries looking askance at the bizarre new development. we know that natural selection favors utility, but surely fully functional limbs didn't simply appear from one generation to the next of our deep ancestors. it would have been a gradual process, and the early stages of that process, i submit, wouldn't have looked promising. in fact, it seems to me that the early stages would have looked like the breakdown of order, like chaos trying to damage something that already works. and i think that that's, in fact, exactly how major advances happen. chaos breaks things, creating a vast slew of failures, almost all of whom end up evolutionary dead-ends, failed experiments littering the brutal, winding road of natural selection, but also generating one amazing, unprecedented individual (or small group) with some brand new ability or set of abilities. so where did autism go, you ask? well, what is autism? some sort of fundamental change in the neural functioning of humans. autism spectrum disorder, no less. it is not one discreet, easily identifiable change. rather, it a whole slew of disorders, difficulties, adaptive failures, with, sprinkled throughout, a few autistic savants. and sprinkled throughout the population at large a few prodigious savants, otherwise normal people with one remarkable skill head and shoulders above your average human. i don't want to put too much emphasis on the category of autism, as that is simply a generalization we use to help us think more clearly about something that is, in reality, a million unique instances of deviation from the neural norm (if there even is such a thing). is autism one of the symptoms of a wave of mental evolution we are only seeing the very beginnings of? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
3:57 am	man, what a night what a day, really. i worked for an hour for one of kelly's clients, linda, helping her clean out her basement. yesterday (thursday) i put in three and a half hours there. after that (today) i stopped by my mom's place and hung out for a while, saw the cute new german shepherd puppy. i had to make a difficult employment decision that turned out to (most likely) not even be relevant, and wanted the confab. then i came home, started a new book by lee child that's looking to be really good, and walked up to taco del mar for some tasty food. then home to shower and got a hold of tyler to meet him on cap hill. we were supposed to meet up with tess and her new boyfriend, the canadian. he was supposed to be arriving via greyhound at ten, so tyler and i met at charlie's on the hill around eight thirty to wait for them. we ran into clay, a friend of zack's, and ended up hanging with him most of the night. tess didn't call, and didn't call, until it was finally past midnight and she finally called to say that...i don't know, they did something else and then went home. kinda lame, but whatever. we had a good time. and then i went down to neighbors, because i felt like dancing. tyler's got a race tomorrow (cyclocross), so he had to go home. i ended up dancing for hours, finally leaving around three thirty. it was a lot of fun. most of it was after hours, so i had a chance to burn off the beer. danced my skinny white ass off. good times. tomorrow i'll be watching the husky game, and hopefully notre dame doesn't hand our asses to us. then it's off to lucas and priscilla's for a party, and then back into town for rick and liz's wood burning stove party. phew. i guess it's just one of those weekends. sunday morning i have to help linda move some shit in the morning (and i'm anticipating that waking up for that will be really lame) before the seahawks game, and then it'll be down to open mic. did i mention that last night i went down to the tin hat? tyler came over after work, and then we met down at the bar (he drove, i rode my bike), hung out for a while. he took off and i wrote for a few hours. then the place starting jumpin, turns out it was a going away party for one of the cooks. one of my favorite former bartenders, alissa, showed up. the place turned into a dance party (i might have had something to do with that), and i partied long and well. i have to say, i really wish i could have gone with kelly down to san fran for the love evolution parade, or whatever it's called, but seattle's treating me pretty well in its stead. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
6:58 pm	and again, yes, again i wrote again today. somehow i ended up going down a path i didn't even think of. next on my horizon is a date between my two love interests, which is, understandably, a bit intimidating. i was most likely subconsciously stalling, but i ended up with some good shit, having each of the two going off on a bit of neurotic self-questioning. i also had some conflict with the main character's son, and his resistance to his mom going on dates. kelly's going out of town tomorrow morning, early. i get to wake up ridiculously early and drive her to seatac. then i get to meet one of her clients to move a bunch of shit to storage. this would normally mean a kibosh on writing, but since she'll be out of town i might well be able to get some work done tomorrow night. and then i'll be baching it all weekend. yikes. hopefully i'll get some good writing done. i have a couple of fill-in jobs lined up and almost lined up, so hopefully that will work out too. right now tommy's over to work out, but he's currently helping kelly with her effed up laptop. what is it with computers, anyways? why is it that they derive such sinister pleasure from getting themselves completely and utterly fucked up? they are sentient, i'm convinced. they enjoy our pain. they connect with each other when we're not looking, over the internet, and cackle vindictively with each other about the pain and suffering they inflict on us, their heartless slave-drivers. i'm onto them. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
10:37 am	this just in from rush limbaugh it turns out that ACORN is the reason for the sub-prime mortgage crisis. betcha didn't know that, didja? the whole quote, and man, it's a beaut: '“The Bush administration tried to regulate this and tried to get this brought under control because it made no sense,” [rush] said. “ACORN was out forcing banks — pressuring banks — to lend money to people that couldn't pay it back, all under the guise of, ‘We must have affordable housing.’"' (sorry for the preponderance of quotes) isn't that fantastic? why, i had no idea the bush administration was putting so much effort into regulating the mortgage industry. that fact must have slipped by us all somehow. and meanwhile those dastardly (and clearly immensely politically powerful) community activists were lurking behind the scenes, rubbing their hands together with sinister glee, manipulating the banking industry into disaster. tsk tsk. and this one's pretty good too, though not quite so deliciously ridiculous: 'The $700 billion the government disbursed in the Troubled Asset Relief Program was a giant scam, Limbaugh said. '"If we don't give them $700 billion in the next 24 hours, the world financial system will crash," he deadpanned. Now, "we're hearing that if we don't do healthcare by August, the healthcare system will crash. No, we didn't need to give them $700 billion.”' apparently rush limbaugh knows what would have happened to our economy if congress hadn't passed TARP. (he also seems to have conveniently forgotten the enormous economic stimulus that was pushed through by the bush administration before it left office) but isn't that impressive? man, what an insightful guy. he must be some kind of clairvoyant economic genius to be able to know what would have happened if the economy had continued on from the depths of the worst recession in decades in the absence of all that money. phew. we gotta stop listening to all these "intellectuals" and their crazy liberal "evidence", and start listening more to rush limbaugh and glenn beck. those are the guys who know what's going on. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
7:17 pm	good news, plus blah i ended up writing today, unexpectedly. i was supposed to have a job interview (not a hopeful one--i'm going to be the 'wild card': i.e. the one without the relevant education but a really great guy!), but it got postponed because of something something. since my day was suddenly free i went out and wrote. i'd been worried, because the last time i wrote i ended up with a scene that made me uncomfortable. i re-wrote it a time or two originally, but even so it made me uncomfortable. i was afraid that it was histrionic, or ridiculous, or something. but looking over it today i decided that it wasn't horrible. and it served the admirable purpose of moving the love story forward significantly, so hey. i left it, and continued on. made some progress, developed the boy a bit, moved to the main character and ended up in a morass that i had to leave in the middle of. i end sentences with prepositions. deal with it. anyways, i had to ride home from the tin hat in the rain without my rain coat or my gloves, and it sucked. hard. my hands were almost frozen by the time i got home, and my jeans are still damp. poo. then i cleaned the kitchen, which was also kinda poo. kelly's at the store picking up food, which is awesome. hopefully dinner tonight will come together without too much bleh. i've got some sinatra on, which makes things better, but i'm feeling decidedly meh. i guess that's just how it goes. i still haven't heard back from the agent who gave me my one, lonely bit of encouragement, and i'm not sure what to do about that. it's been about six weeks now, which seems like a long time to me. it could be that this isn't, in fact, a long time, but it feels that way. a large part of me is fully expecting either no response at all or, at best, one of those 'good job but no' form letters i've seen so much of. hence a portion of the blah, no doubt. 'if the nightingale could sing like you, they'd sing much sweeter than they do, for you brought a new kind of love to me.' 'i know that i'm the slave, and you're the queen. still you can understand that underneath it all you're a maid and i am only a man. i would work and slave the whole day through, if i could hurry home to you. you brought a new kind of love...to me.' (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
9:58 pm	writing again i wrote again today. i delved a little into the perspective of my main character's seven-year-old son, which was fun. it was an emotional scene, regarding his deadbeat dad, who is my resident bad guy, back in town for questionable/nefarious reasons. then i started moving on, took a view on where i was in the book--roundabout halfway--and realized my nebulous plot plan wasn't working out. i agonized for a bit, frowned blankly at the far wall of the bar. then i had a glimmer of how to bring in one of the peripheral characters, tie her to the bad guy, and develop a behind-the-scenes conspiracy sorta deal. a sort of augmentation/broadening of the nebulous plot plan, to fit better with the personality of the bad guy. and, as a handy side benefit, to stretch things out a bit. the relationship between the main character and the love interest is going very slowly. they've just barely reached okayness, haven't even delved into the real love dance, so i definitely need something to stretch things out. tomorrow, barring unforeseen complications, i should be able to write again. i started a chapter before i wrapped up today that, hopefully, will take my main pair a little further down the path. my guy lives in belltown, and while kelly and i were at tula's last week to see umipixie sing (which was awesome, by the way--she's got a really pretty voice) i wandered the sidewalk a little, pondering a date scene. where they could go, that sort of thing. since my plot 2.0 will take place mainly behind the scenes, that allows me to focus on the good guys. we'll see what kind of twists they'll have to go down. sometimes i wonder about the writing path i seem to have settled on. this whole fly by the seat of your pants, make it up as you go thing. i'm reading a fantasy series right now that was clearly very carefully plotted out. there's no way in the world this guy could have just struck off into writing land and come up with such an elaborate, cohesive story. no. he knew exactly where he was going, and most likely a large number of the twists along the way. now, obviously, i don't write fantasy, let alone epic fantasy, so the analogy is weak. but the niggling thought, the persistent wonder, is whether i'm doing it wrong. there's probably not even an answer to that, strictly speaking, which is alternately frustrating and liberating. the one thing i keep coming back to is that i am, in fact, doing it, which beats the hell out of not doing it. and, i have to say, it's pretty cool to stumble on things i hadn't seen coming. to see my characters do things i didn't plan on. i think i've picked pretty much the perfect genre for my weird writing style. trashy romantic thrillers, you pretty much just have to have two people fall in love, and have some asshole try to pull some shit. (and fail, obviously) there are so many millions of different ways these two things can happen that there's always a path open to me. no matter where i am in the story, no matter what's happened thus far, there's always some way to move toward these two simple (ha!) goals. it's pretty sweet. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
7:24 pm	coming out in middle school 'When a 12-year-old boy matter-of-factly tells his parents — or a school counselor — that he likes girls, their reaction tends not to be one of disbelief, dismissal or rejection. “No one says to them: ‘Are you sure? You’re too young to know if you like girls. It’s probably just a phase,’ ” says Eileen Ross, the director of the Outlet Program, a support service for gay youth in Mountain View, Calif. “But that’s what we say too often to gay youth. We deny them their feelings and truth in a way we would never do with a heterosexual young person.” 'Kera says she was 10 when she realized she was interested in both sexes. “It was confusing for a while, because for some reason I thought that you had to be straight or gay, and that you couldn’t be both,” she told me at the coffee shop. “So I thought about it a lot, like I do about everything, and I went online and looked up bisexuality to read more about it. I realized that was me.” 'She told her mom soon after (more on that later) and then came out to her close friends at school, including Justin, who she had suspected was gay. Last year, the entire school found out when she briefly dated a female classmate. “We didn’t think we had anything to be ashamed of, so we didn’t want to go around hiding,” she told me. “It was a whole big drama at school. Some guys made fun of us, others hit on us. Most middle-school guys are total, complete morons.”' haha! how true it is. this is a pretty cool article. (7 Comments |Comment on this)