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(me at the National Gallery of Art in late 2006)
I’m incubated.
I’m locked into that cycle of in the house doing work, out to class to spend hours in lectures, and then back into the house to do more work. I broke this down with my friend today. When an able-bodied young man finds himself watching 4400 at six p.m on a random Tuesday evening then you know something is wrong. But this is real life.The reality of certain things were unveiled to me when I moved off-campus two years ago. Firstly, when you live seven miles away from a social hub (i.e college). There willl be no one to speak to save your roommate, and no where to go. Secondly, you desire to do less. Basically everything else becomes important. How well food tastes, how comfortable your bed is, how funny that romantic comedy you watch by yourself is, etc. I was walking to class today listening to an Our Lady Peace album, Spiritual Machines, and it sounds like the soundtrack to my life right now. Track 4, “Life”, starts out with a few questions that everyone can relate to:
“How many times have you been pushed around? Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”
“How many times have your friends let you down? Is anybody there? Did anybody stare?”
Introspective questions run abound in this track, and then it goes into a melancholy (yet oddly uplifting) chorus, where leader singer Raine Maida tells me that ‘Life is waiting for you’. The Peace has been known to drop sometimes cryptic lyrics onto their fans, but I felt chills hearing these questions asked to me by someone I don’t know. Then, on track 7, “Are you sad?” it asks even more questions:
“Are you sad? Are you holding yourself? Are you locked in your room? You shouldn’t be….”
Too often I have felt like this person… sometimes a bit trapped by circumstance, or something else. Its the working grind of the world that keeps us in that bubble of limited social interactions.
Even though I do have classes with people I interact with THEN, when the day ends everyone goes their separate ways. I go home, and listen to depressed millionaires sing about their life’s discourses.
I think this is part of being a writer, or an artist. I’m not just sitting by myself staring at the ceiling, getting familiar with little cracks in certain spots, I’m being proactive. I sit, I write, I design, I do a lot of things. But as I told my friend from a class today, “If no one knows you, no one can ever know you are talented.”
I think I’m having an off day again. The work load of school is normalizing. This means for me that things are reaching a natural order where I know what I have to do to maximize my time in classes and so forth, but dammit it gets really lonely sometimes. Its also starting to get cold, meaning if I am going to get in the groove with some people, i’ll have to do it soon. Or I will be “holding myself” in my room, amidst the eerie pluckings of some faceless man’s guitar.
No one can really describe certain kinds of loneliness. It sits on your tongue like the leftover taste of flat soda, and tugs at your hair like an inattentive child. I’m sure the loneliness a business CEO with 14 hour days, millions in the bank and no time to socialize is uniquely different from a college kid who spends his days writing and doing classes. But at the end, they are both suffering from a mild form of social disconnect; a lack of options.
I don’t think i’m sad, but man, sometimes I feel like i’m halfway there. But I will press on… keep writing, with my eye on the prize.
Okay.
My title is horibbly deceptive. Last week wasn’t the greatest week, but I did feel like I accomplished a lot. With an 18 credit load, lack of sleep and feelings of mania crawling up my back, I still managed to do a lot of design-work, kept blogging and deal with my course load for classes.
My most interesting part of last week were my late night trips to Kinko’s to make this birthday gift for my ex-girlfriend. Yes, yes, I know what you are saying, I’m a loser.
I went to a meeting today for my school paper and one of the offered articles related to OCD. I wonder if I have a compulsion when it comes to design and writing. Maybe its my outlet, or my mojo or whatever. But there was one night after traveling for about an hour in total time (walking, waiting on bus, then walking some more) the Kinkos I went to was locked. I thought about smashing the large glass pane and doing my copying then. But I doubt the officers would believe I was trying to spend a few bucks doing copies.
So it was a long, involved week, with emotional ups and downs, and the release of that emotion during the weekend. It got released because the week ended. Today was an amazingly productive day. I did a ton of homework, two cartoons for the day, a presentation for class, and i”M about to start doing some script editing. Maybe I’m not doing as much as say–the CEO of GE, but i’m trying to maintain. I’m idle and e-mailing random people on the “w4m” section of Craigslist as a social experiment. Who knows, maybe it will give me something to write home about.
ciao
The project i’ve been mentioning intermittently in these blogs (Three Weeks and Hurricane) is my first real attempt at writing non-fiction. It has to deal with me, and me trying to find out my next step in life, by using a month in Jamaica for that EXACT purpose. Now, to make life easier next time I feel like writing non-fiction, I will write essays (probably short blogs) to capture some prevailing thoughts of mine, so that as time passes I’ll find it easier to write non-fiction. To me, even non-fiction must have some kind of story, or a framework someone can follow. I’m not sure if I have that specifically in TWAH. I’ll have to polish the story, and do some heavy re-writing (like any book) but I think the “theme” of non-fiction needs to be captured in a certain viewpoint, consistently over time. The Emotion can’t vary too much, nor can the feel.
So, I think this is me trying to document my thoughts for another project possibly in the future.
The Futile Fight
My friend and I are heading to a party called Wet in Georgetown. Its Saturday, and I spent Friday night at their place in Silver Spring to escape the noisy ravages of the Northwest DC. I like Silver Spring. It has a clean, well-combed vibe to it that always makes me think of family and kids. This is probably a biased perspective, because there is a particular area in downtown Silver Spring where they have Astroturf setup. On any given sunny day, you will see parents with their children roaming about, tossing projectiles and spilling liquids. My friends live no where near this area. They are about ten minutes up the road in a quiet housing complex. A friend of mine, a cool Italian guy who uses “Fuck” after every tenth word, tells me to head to this place called the Blue Gin for a free party.
“Come man, its gonna be great you know, fucking hot bitches and what not my man. ” I laughed as he said this. However, it was Saturday night and like many stressed out college seniors, I needed something to do.
Whenever I think of Georgetown, two things come to mind. A certain smell, and an image of a certain strip on Wisconsin Avenue. I’m assuming these two things pop into my head first because when I went to the Georgetown Mall for the first time, it had a very odd smell, like someone sprayed Gucci No.5 in a bathroom occupied by a troop of red bull-amped chimps. The second image i’m sure is based on my previous French Connection obsession (possibly 30% of my wardrobe is french connection) and that was one of the first stores I would frequent. My two images aren’t the common representation of the town. I’d say that most people (who dont’ live in Georgetown) think of two things when they go there, Money and stuffy people. I personally don’t like to cover everyone in a demographic under a certain blanket, but being at a club in Georgetown really does remind me of some of the really “uptown” parties I go to in Jamaica. The normal setup seems to be a lot of very nicely dressed people standing up, talking with people they are familiar with, and then ignoring everyone else. I’m sure this formula doesn’t hold all the time, but like most people who don’t live in Georgetown. I don’t care. That’s just how it seems.
I’m venturing to the club this night simply because the week has been filled with stressful night and annoyingly long classes. Like most parts of the city, finding parking is next to impossible and I end up going to the club first while my friend looks for parking. For September 15, it is unusually chilly and I frown slightly thinking of the grisly winter about to come. Blue Gin is in an alley between an Abercrombie & Fitch and Benneton store. I recognize the spot, the last time I went there was with my very assertive Moroccan friend who scoffed at the prices of the drinks and demanded to go somewhere else. After I schmooze with the bouncer a bit, he checks my name on a list to get into the private party upstairs and I go inside. Its a very nice, high-endish lounge with soft lighting, a few nice bars with plush leather couches and glass tables. The crowd is relatively mixed in the usual Georgetown way, a delicate sprinking of mostly white, mostly Middle-eastern people then a drop of two of any other minority groups. I go upstairs and greet my friend Mr. B who’s with his girlfriend. We have a few moments of small talk and in between I survey the crowd.
Everyone seems like the white collar types, milling about on their third drink. I see a lot of cute girls, but i’m not inspired. Its only 11:30. I’ll have to see if the mood of the place changes in an hour or so before I can dub the event a “flop” or “hot”. I get a drink and sip on it while I watch the crowd some more. The birthday girl is a slim, attractive blonde with pretty eyes. She walks around almost on her toes, smiling and taking pictures. I hear its her twenty-fifth birthday. I immediately assume she is wealthy, has a GREAT job and would never speak to me.
I tell her happy birthday the next time she walks past me.
By the time my friend finds parking and comes into the club, I’ve been talking with Mr. B’s girlfriend and her two friends and found some interesting information. One friend will be leaving on Tuesday to go to New York to be a producer for the MSNBC show HardBall. The other girl, when I asked her “What do you do?” she smiled, looked to the left as if to say ‘ How do I say this?’. Then her friend, Mr. B’s girlfriend touched me and said “She’s a dancer.” “A dancer?” I said repeated. “No, she’s actually a stripper.”
They both laugh and I take another look at her friend. She is attractive, with long jet black hair, and a shapely body, but I wouldn’t have pegged her for a stripper. I hadn’t even been to a strip club in DC yet. In between calling a strip club a “Gentleman’s club” and laughing amongst each other about something happening near the bar, I left and went downstairs. The music had started to pickup now,( meaning the DJ got smart and started playing Hip-hop) and I headed to the dance floor. This is where the “Futile Fight” begins. The first thing I notice is what I call the “defensive formation”. Like the Roman Phalanx, women who go to clubs have a formation I call “The Ring.” Its pretty explanatory. The girls form a ring and dance and laugh amongst each other while any guy who tries to break this formation generally gets rejected. The only thing I’ve noticed with this military exercise is that as ‘the ring’ grows in size if two or three guys come in all at once, its hard for the other friends to help them reject the fellow,s.
I’m on the dance floor and I see three rings. In the corner six very cute girls dance with themselves with their backs turned to everyone. Beside me, a gorgeous Euro-looking chick and her two Indian girlfriends are dancing three millimeters apart. Behind me, a gaggle of black chicks dance in a similar ring. To the left of them, a mixed bag of Asian and white girls are dancing as well, also in a ring. I see four guys try with different groups to get a dance, or to get in, and they are all shot down. I don’t try anything. I’m dancing by myself and having enough fun to not be depressed. I’ve seen “the Ring” so many times that if I go to a club where there are more than five rings I either dance by myself or leave shortly after. A friend of mine once told me, “Guys are so grimy in the club. All they want to do is grab your ass and try and sleep with you that night. When I go to the club, I go to have fun, so I don’t dance with anyone.”
To this, I chuckled. Of course there are guys who go to clubs to do just that, but most guys are insecure, working and have little time to socialize. They go to clubs to meet women, end of story. So i’m thinking, If I go to ten clubs in a night, and let’s say 90% of the girls who I like don’t want to dance/meet anyone. Then no matter how good looking you are (this actually might help ) you might be fighting an uphill battle. Add to that the fact that a lot of people dress and act the same, so there is nothing really to distinguish you from anyone else. 99% of the black guy in the club had shaved heads and had on similar outfits (light coloured dress shirts, nice pants). 90% of the white guys in the club were dressed in a similar fashion also. What distinguishes everyone? Well, for the black guys they had different heights, skin tones and builds. For the white guys, they had different color hair, heights, and builds. But let’s say for the most part everyone looks “the same”. What’s going to make you anymore interesting than me? Since all black men supposedly can dance, what’s to make a girl want to dance with me more than the next guy? Or, what’s to make a girl think this guy over here has a better job than that guy?
Futile fight? Who knows. But I left the club after an hour and headed to Wonderland, on 11th Street in Northwest DC. I headed upstairs to the dance floor and a slovenly looking man in a red shirt rested his hand on my chest.
“You’re overdresed.” he said.
I glanced at his hand. He patted my chest again.
“You’re overdressed.”
He walked away and I smiled to myself. In a Sports Jacket I was overdressed for Wonderland, which is a residential bar in Columbia Heights (everyone was wearing a t-shirt). But I was more comfortable. Wonderland broke the mold. There were no rings. I might not have a victory, but its not that much of a futile fight.
* * * *
My aunt had recommended I read this article a year or so ago. The funny thing is, through my own contacts, I eventually met a very good friend of one of these Authors. I was rumaging through a box of mine, looking for cardstock paper of all things, when I saw the article. When I recognized the name of the Author, well published writer Colin Channer, I called him right away! Here’s the article for your reading purposes its from the June 27 paper of the New York Times.
page 1 page 2
page 3
Today isn’t a great day for me. As you can see i’m doing my second blog of the day. I’m hurting a bit right now, because of an event that happened on Friday night that I can’t get into. So, like most people, I’m trying to distract myself by either eating too much, watching tv, or spending money. As it stands, I really don’t want to go down a self-destuctive path, so I decided to research the new Ipod, a.k.a “The Ipod Touch”and blog about it. I wouldn’t call myself a technophile, and I am a skeptical early adopter (I learned my lesson after the Ipod Video came out). This new version of the Ipod excites me somewhat. Hey, I’m bored, single with nothing to do. A cool device that has a cyborg like sexiness has appeal in our wired world of today.
I’ve owned almost every version of the ipod ever made. This hasn’t been by choice. I bought the third generation thinking it was a godsend. I like the way little red lights lit up the buttons on the Ipod face, and even though it was pre click-wheel, it was still pretty easy to navigate. One night I went to a club my friend worked at. It actually wasn’t a club, but this cool Sushi restaurant called Japone in Dupont circle. Either way, I was chilling in the the back where there was a bar, talking to this cute bartender. As she commented on my hair (it was a huge fuzzy muff of blonde at the time) I rested my man-bag on the bar chair. I took a thirty second walk to the front of the restaurant and when I came back my Ipod inside the bag was gone. I was upset because I had never had a device stolen from me in that way, but it wasn’t that bad. The third gen had a terrible battery life (mine capped at 8 hours) and it would “crash” on me occassionally. A little while later, I sold a bunch of stuff on Craigslist and then I bought my fourth gen (with clickwheel!) That wasn’t bad, but I only owned it for one week. I went on a business trip with a few classmates to checkout the Investment banking world. Seeing all those droopy eyed, highly paid college grads only a year or two older than me made me cringe. Investment banking wasn’t for me. I did read the paper however, I see that a new “Ipod Photo” was coming out in… a week.
I almost screamed, because I had bought my Ipod just recently, but as soon as I got back to DC I put it for sale on CL and bam! It was gone. So I bought my Ipod Photo soon after, and I must say I was the most pleased with this Ipod (even more than the Video). The Ipod photo felt very sturdy and it had an amazing battery life, it went up to 21 hours on a full charge. I used this Ipod for at least a year, then I heard about the Video. I researched it for a while, hating the fact that the battery life was now a paltry 16 hours and that you couldnt’ adjust the brightness on the screen. “No matter,” I said to myself “It is new tech. And New tech is F-ing cool.” So I bought the new Ipod with most of the Photo sale money and I was very dissapointed. The screen was marginally bigger and the menu was cool-ish, but the battery life for me was almost cut in half and I didn’t like watching video on it. The screen was too small to really enjoy full length video, and it was a task actually putting movies on the device itself. So after owning the Ipod video for about two months, I sold it.
Later I would horribly regret this, when I eventually wanted a portable music player and had none. Either way, as a birthday gift I received an Ipod Nano and I’ve been using that for over a year now. Naturally my head works in tens of gigabytes, and its a huge drop from 30 gigs on the Ipod Video (or 20 gigs on the Photo) to a measly 2 gigs on the Nano. But, I organized my playlist, made sure everything was okay, and I’ve been using it ever since. My happiest accessory is a pair of those Bose headphones they sell at the Apple store for 150 bucks. (I bought mine for $85. Ah…Craigslist). I had no desire to ever get an Ipod video again. I knew sooner or later, Apple would drop an Ipod that would wow the masses again. When the Iphone came out earlier this year, I didn’t bat an eyelid. Only a crazy person (I thought) would camp out to get a device with slow phone service, severe data limitations just because it looks “cool”. I fiddled with the phone at the Apple store, and I agree it IS cool, but not 600 bucks worth of cool.
But now I hear about the Ipod Touch, and my heart feels warm. I’m so used to my 2 gig nano that 8 gigs sounds like a lot of space. I like the fact that it has more functionality as well for my money. The $299 price tag doesnt’ sound that bad either BECAUSE it has so much. I can access wifi points and surf the web, I can browse my music by tapping my fingers, and the battery life isn’t 16 hours, its 22. Its also thinner than the Iphone (take that At&t!). So if I can, I think I’ll be heading to the Apple store to get my touch and be an early adopter of THAT product. Then I’ll hear about the “Ipod Touch II” which comes out in January which has 20 gigs of Space for $299 and then i’ll rush to sell my little 8 gig. But until that time comes, we’ll see what happens. This has nothing to do with my usual blogging about writing, but I needed to vent about something and the Ipod gave me a really good excuse.
A chapter in that new book i’m reading talks about being very organized as a writer and man I’m feeling it. With my daily cartoon duties, film assignments and high-energy demands of long classes plus my extra-curricular activities, its pretty crazy. Balancing a full load at school and then organizing query submissions, entering competitions as well as researching Grad schools isn’t easy, but so far my system that’s worked somewhat has been.
(a) Set first a weekly goal on top of everything.
For me, my goal last week was to finish my current project, and write 30 pages. With all my computer issues and running all over DC I only ended up doing about 18 pages, but if I hadn’t set the goal I might not have written anything.
(b) Relax, somehow.
I’m always buzzed and i’m pretty high energy. When the demands of everything are on your brain you want to write, excercise, play video games, read all at the same time. There has to be a balance unless you’ll burnout. I’m not the best at this, but i’ve worked hard to relax ( I recently got a Yoga video )
(c) Organize all your tasks relating to things that MUST be done
Say you want to send ou 30 query letters. You need to have all 30 agents names and addresses ready. 30 envelopes and stamps ready and have the letters individually addressed to each of these people. A trick I did was to make an Excel file to track them all. So each time I dropped a letter in an envelope I added them to the database. This also helps you keep track of dates. I received a reply to a query I sent three months ago recently, but at least I can see who I sent it to, and see if I should query them again.
But the basic goal is to do what you can as soon as possible. Make a list, write it down and be active so you don’t become overwhelmed.
(d) Read.
(e) Evaluate the goals.
Its easy to see your progress afte ryou set your goals. So if I sent out 30 queries and go zero responses. I probably need to change my query. Or if I sent them out six weeks ago (and they are all e-mail based) and i’ve gotten no reply, maybe I need a new agent list? I think its hard to see where you are going if you don’t know where you are coming from. For example, I send out 24 letters for my first manuscript “Eden Speaks” and got 24 rejections. Alas, the world wasn’t ready for a Jamaican novel in the U.S! But the point was, I sent out all 24 and got my replies and I ended up pushing another project. So I was at least able to say to myself that “maybe agents aren’t ready for a book like this.” It allowed me to gauge something. No point having your book in the drawer where you keep dirty magazines.
So If I plan A thing in B time frame, and I get C result, then I know what I can tweak and adjust to make sure i’m doing the best things possible.
That’s about it for me. I’m trying to work on my organization seriously and I hope this helps someone else out there in la-la land.
