The Year Ahead

This is normally around the time of year people are supposed to come up with their new years resolutions for how they will change their lives over the next calendar year. This is typically a reflection of all that didn't get accomplished the previous year. All the projects that weren't completed, or ever started for that matter. It's letting go of regret about what we couldn't do by fooling ourselves into thinking we'll change through long term goals we will put off until we forget about them.

If you Google it, there are no shortage of random charts with no data and/or dubious sources to back them up that prove what I'm saying:

I don't want to be statistic fodder this year. If the type of grand plan thinking involved in New Years Resolution worked to accomplish my goals, I'd have been the #1 best selling astronaut rock star billionaire writer who owns the world's first solar-powered perpetually-flying house by age 10 (a resolution I made when I still didn't understand that resolutions weren't like birthday wishes; or the unreliable nature of birthday wishes for that matter). Trying to use that type of thinking is only giving myself a chance to fail at a task I probably don't really want to do anyway. This is usually because of the overwhelming immensity involved in what I set out to do or I set the bar so low the accomplishment isn't really worth mentioning. Though last year's resolution to find a better smelling body wash has paid off pretty solidly.

My old resolutions have always involved changing various habits (write daily, work less, exercise daily, eat less junkfood) yet even with those type of resolutions I have a hard time acting on my desire for the change. Resolutions by their very nature tend to be immense life changes that are all or nothing situations. I've never considered myself a cold turkey kind of habit quitter, so I can't imagine I'm the type to pick one up similarly.

That's why instead of making an overwhelming demand of myself in the guise of a New Year's Resolution, I'm planning to try to affect more subtle daily changes to my habits. Give myself room to improve rather than be disappointed in myself for not accomplishing the overwhelming goal I'd originally set out to do. Looking at it this way gives me a chance to improve on plans I make depending on how they work out without the worry-weight of a huge decision. 

What's this feeling I've got? Did I have too much coffee today? Not yet I don't think. Wait a minute, I remember this. It's that same feeling I had heading west from NY after college. It's optimistic hope for the weeks ahead. Hope, welcome back to my guts.

Embracing my Inner Nerd

15 year old me would be so proud

I like to read books about wizards and shit. I like to watch TV and movies about space adventures and zombie apocalypses, but damn it sometimes the protagonist is doing it wrong and I know I could do it better. Not always, but sometime the protagonist is a badass and just has a touch of the douche-face that is spoiling (I've turned off movies less than 5 minutes in due to Eric Balfour being in the movie for any amount of time. I'm sorry, but being a Skeet Ulrich knock off, who in turn is a Johnny Depp knock off, is no reason to be put in front of a camera).

When I was in middle school, my friends and I had a routine every weekend. We got together under to play role playing games and gorging ourselves on junk food. I don't remember actually playing most of the games. I think we mostly made characters to use to adventure through whatever world we were hoping to explore and then got distracted with talking about what badasses we were gonna be when we actually played. We mostly made references to awful B-movies and then got too annoyed with one another to get to playing. Eventually it stopped being cool to play nerd games on your weekends and my friends bailed on our routine for other stuff.

Except none of us shaved our heads and ODed on Percocet...at least I didn't

What with one thing and another 15 years passed and my interest in telling collaborative stories with characters controlled by other people has started to peak my interest again. The major problem I had was trying to get other people to agree to try to play games with me.

Far from it indeed.

I said role playing games and very few people had positive images about the amount of fun they would have. The more I pressed with my friends the more I realized their hesitation was typically with a fear of not knowing exactly how to play the game and not being able to get into it. People became a lot more responsive when I started calling them collaborative fiction games. I'm still the only person I know that enjoys them enough to learn the rules and teach them to other people and get them to play the game, but willing players is a step in the right direction.

My conclusion: I think this is really all leading me to needing to start a blog about this type of gaming. Not only the things I do, but reviews of games. I've got hundreds of PDFs I've collected over the years of all kinds of games, from the worst to the best that were executed poorly. I usually talk my friends heads off about these games if I have them cornered long enough. Maybe it'd work better if I just blathered endlessly on the internet about instead, seems to work here at least.

Cheap books and someone else's efforts to be heard

I had an English professor early on in college that gave an impassioned, albeit well rehearsed and repeated as his opening day starter for every course he taught, speech about books that always stuck with me. He urge us all not to sell our books back at the end of the semester. The college gives you a terrible price on the buy backs and who knows when you might find use for them later. Just one more way colleges screw you over, he said.

Bitter old English professors aside (or realist ahead of his time?), I have always loved used books. The more tattered the pages the better. Books that look like they had gone every where with someone. Passages underlined, notes in then margins, dog eared pages, evidence of another reader. I always felt books picked up extra meaning beyond the words on the page when you could see the wear on the spine and someone's words in the margins.

That is the mindset I that has always kept me from getting a Kindle. While I'm sure I'd love an ereader, I feel like it disconnects me from the book too much. There is a lack of permanence in the way the feel. A delicate nature that makes it hard to live in the words the same way as a physical book. Letting it pick up who you are as a reader as it travels with you. Those lived in books always felt handmade to me.

I've been thinking a lot about the DIY and crowd sourcing communities. The idea of building it yourself by hand instead of having someone glaze over your efforts with the gloss of expensive print jobs. At the same time letting the community that invests in choose help the projects develop into their full potential. In still piecing together my mission statement for a project I'm going to begin working on soon. If I can get a central idea to umbrella all my efforts under first, then I'll be able to really push myself into it and get it done. If I start trying without that idea solidified in my head fist I'll just waste my efforts trying to figure out step one for an unfinished idea. That wouldn't end up helping anyone.

What does it mean to want to be published in a book?

So it happened again. I submitted a poem I wrote to an anthology being put together by someone I know and it got accepted. You can find my poem along with countless other poems by some of the most talented poets in Southern California in the book A Poet is Poet No Matter How Tall an anthology by Raundi K. Moore-Kondo. While I'm honored to have been a part of the anthology, I don't think my name on the table of contents is gonna sell any books to anyone besides my parents. If I'm honest, I don't even have a clear recollection of which poem I submitted. I've missed most of the book release events that have happened lately. I've been adjusting to the hectic Fall 2013 season of Andyland: new job, new schedule, the changing weather affecting my sleep.

Raundi is one of the most motivated and talented poets I know. She loves the written word and teaches poetry to groups of home schooled kids. She invites poets from the area to help teach her classes and share there work. She has a website too. Oh what's this: http://www.theloveofwords.com/ a link to her website where you can find out about taking your Southern Californian children to so they can learn about poetry and expressing themselves through written verse? Why yes it is. How convenient for those that are interested in not raising Philistines, but instead well rounded individuals.

It feels strange to be published in something. I don't feel a connection to this new anthology, which was also the case for the last one. I suppose part of it has something to do with not getting to the book parties and events, but at least with this one I feel like my poem belongs in the anthology.

I still regret the poem I submitted to the other anthology. Now my poem about gifts to give loved ones who've died is in a book of poems about zombies. While reading humorous poems about the zombie outbreaks you run across mine; which just makes you feel uncomfortable in the context. I always felt like it shouldn't have been accepted, but the guy publishing it knew me and I'd kind of written the poem off a prompt he gave me in a writing group he'd run and he liked it a lot so he just put it in. I'm grateful I got to be associated with the book and the press, but I feel like I could have written (and subsequently did write) a better zombie themed poem.

The whole thing had me question a lot of my previous motivations in my work. I'd always wanted to have my name on the cover of a book. Not on the cover page of an ebook, but a physical object to have on a shelf. I am not sure that's a motivation I can follow anymore. I don't think there will be a sudden revival of people not buying shiny new tablet readers and instead spending more money for actual books. This doesn't mean I don't still want to get my work out there. I've just got to rethink my approach. I think 2014 will be a better year for me than the past few have been and it'll make my attempts at getting my work out there much easier. Now I just need to spend the rest of this year figuring out what my new approach will be.

Keeping up with my sleep

When I find myself laying in bed wishing I were more tired than I was, I'm reminded of days when I used to wish I had more time in the day to get everything in I wanted done. I used to stay up until the sun came up over the weekends just out of habit. I always found my most interesting ideas came to me in the middle of the night. I'm not the only one who thinks so. It's a popular idea.

From a man of few written words, Rives:

Society's sleeping habits have changed dramatically over the past century. Compensating for all that giant populations bring to a city. Competitive job markets, 40 hour work weeks, commuting, and getting up at the crack of dawn the following day to fight for freeway space early to avoid the slow crawl of traffic. People 100 years ago had a lot more free time on their hands to set their own schedules. Of course they also had child labor, no safety standards, and no indoor plumbing. I imagine that meant many of their free hours were spent avoiding dying rather than spent on leisurely activities.

I've always thought about changing my sleeping pattern in some way. I thought of going to bed extra early, waking up for a few hours in the middle of the night to read or write, then back to sleep until dawn for the day. I wanted to try some crazy Uberman's sleep schedule in college. My main hesitation was that everything I read said that kind of change to your sleep schedule typically involved a period of adjustment of about 10 days where you wanted to kill yourself from lack of regular sleep; and who needs to deal with that for any days let alone 10?

Since I don't have any trust fund money headed my way, and I'm not counting on any lotto winnings rolling in to free up my time to have a ridiculous sleep schedule. I'll just do what I've always done: celebrate day light savings time in all of it's brain tricking weirdness. This year my day light savings resolution is to use the extra day light I have in the morning to help get me use to waking up AND being functional early in the morning. I'm gonna use the extra night hours to trick my brain into thinking it's the middle of the night. That's kind of the same thing as a dramatic adjustment to your sleeping pattern, right?

My new job doesn't have mirrors for practicing jazz hands

I finally escaped the gravitational pull of my last part-time job and into an exponentially better full-time job. It still feels like a dream. I keep expecting them to tell me the really awful part. "Oh by the way, in exchange for the free bagels on Monday, this dude comes by Thursday to punch us all in the neck." or "Hey it's time for the weekly thumbtack eating contest. Participation is mandatory." or "No that's not the fire alarm. That's the: it's Friday alarm. Yes it will be sounding all day. No we can't turn it down. Knob broke off at '11' years ago."

Thinking back to what I put up with for 8 months or so those things wouldn't really be that unexpected in this position. I can't believe I used to sit at a desk where I could not extend my legs fully and still use the computer without sitting sideways. I'm kind of a giant, so sitting at the desk at my last job was similar to sitting in the backseat of a two door Volkswagen. Before that if I extended my legs incorrectly I accidentally unplugged an entire side of the office. Being able to have my legs in front of me without fear of disaster while using a computer is a strange and new experience to me. Shockingly, it is much easier to do work when you're comfortable.

The new job is full-time; which previously had been a major issue for me. Full-time jobs mean less time for pursuing my aspirations of writing something worth reading. Looking back on it though, it wasn't the hours the job took, it was the hours I spent getting there. An hour each way driving to get less than 30 miles drains you whichever direction you're headed. When I would take public transportation to get there, it meant 1.5 hours of public transportation to get 30 miles as long as I didn't miss any of my connection. Having that crap commute made the stress of my job seem that much less appealing. Who wants to drag themselves out of a nice warm bed to go to a place they know will make them unhappy by the end of the day?

I'm still not sure how my new job will turn out, but at least I haven't found any random word documents in a some hidden folder in the computer's recent documents pleading to me to leave before it's too late or anything. Not saying that necessarily happened at any of my old jobs, just saying I've learned my lesson and those are the type of red flags I keep an eye out.
-AB

Getting Lost on my Commute Back to Work

Every time I go looking for work, I inevitably go for the first job that is offered to me. This is a terrible way to pick your place of employment. It leads to an inevitable feeling of not belonging there. The novelty of income wears thin when you are someplace you don't want to be. It isn't that you don't like the place necessarily, but more along the lines of not feeling engaged by the work.

Any time I go looking for work, I have visions of some close to perfect job just landing in my lap. Some high-paying job I could get that would relieve the stresses in my life. That job does not exist in the real world though (at least not yet...), so I end up crawling through the muck of craigslist ads with bad spelling, high standards, and poor wages for anyone who isn't trying to become a salesman.

I remember dreaming of becoming a teacher some day. Then the crushing world of academia reared it's hideous beastie face at me and I lost interest in it a bit too late in the game to change things up while I was at college. I embrace my love of the dying medium of books and their wordfulness. I'm adjusting my dreams to the new world in which I do not what to be broken by the standardized test teaching nonsense of most public schools these days.

So what's it mean when you lose a dream. You have to find another one obviously. That part I haven't figured out yet. I don't know where my dream career is and given the prospects being offered by the internet's go to junk pile. Still, I think it's time I tried to figure out what the next dream is gonna be.
-AB