My parents and brother have been in town this week, so I haven’t been on the computer too much after work. It’s been fun having them here, but I may need to start exercising a little more next week, as I’ve eaten out every night since last Friday. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
I did find enough time to go golfing last Saturday. I haven’t been going very often in the last few years, and I just suck now. I mean, really suck. I didn’t realize just how bad I was until I was out there on the course. It felt as though I was golfing for the first time. l left agitated and frustrated, so I went to a golf shop and bought a new set of clubs.
This is how my mind works.
I’m now determined to become a better golfer. My goal is to be Not Horrible, which I think is fairly realistic. During these years away from the course, my swing has gone to hell. I didn’t realize it until my friends pointed it out to me, but I now swing like an angry Cerebral Palsy patient.
In an attempt to correct this, I’ve been going to the driving range after work. I don’t know if anyone here golfs, but I found this video really useful and thought I’d share it. They also have a number of other interesting videos.
I’ve started going to a rock climbing gym. Where there were once able hands, now there are two bloody stumps, so I’ll keep this short.
Here’s a couple videos from an American duo, The Dresden Dolls. I guess you could describe their sound as neurotic, lounge punk. I really like their 2006 album Yes, Virginia, but their self-titled album is great and the videos were a lot more interesting.
The Books, Words, and Writing weblog linked to a list of the top 50 books that got people hooked on reading, from a survey of over 100,000 people. It’s an interesting mix of books. I’m surprised to see The Bible on the list. It doesn’t really seem like the type of book that would introduce children to the world of literature.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe jumped out at me. I remember borrowing The Chronicles of Narnia box set from my sister in grade five or six and loving the series. In fact, I still have that box set sitting on my shelf right now. I’ve always had a natural talent for pilfering books.
Before that, I remember sitting in the library in grade four with my friend Mike, devouring every Hardy Boys book they had on the shelf. We were determined to get through the series, even if every book was essentially the same. At that time I was also reading through the Fear Street series by R.L. Stine, which surprisingly aren’t on the list.
In early elementary school I was reading a mix of children’s books, but I can’t think of any specific titles right now. I remember enjoying the Mr. Men books in the early years. Oh how I loved Mr. Mischief.
But to choose the book, that single book that got me hooked on reading, I have to go back even further than that. Back to those nights before kindergarten, before I even knew how to read my own name, when I’d curl up in bed and listen to my dad read The Hobbit to me. My imagination blossomed within those pages. I could nearly feel the ground under my feet as I traveled beside Bilbo, Gandalf, and Thorin. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad mimicking Gollum’s voice as he read.
I firmly believe my lifelong reading and writing habits were formed and developed those nights. My dad didn’t inspire me to go out and buy more books or to pick up a pen and start inventing tales; I was far too young for that. He did, however, shape the way I relate to stories, and that’s a gift for which I’m most thankful.
This is a list of the books and graphic novels I’ve been reading this year. I’ll be continually adding new books and occasionally bumping this post to the front page when it’s had a few updates. I think it’ll be interesting to look back at the end of the year and examine my reading habits. If a review grows to be too large, I’ll create a new post for it and link to it from here.
My friend Mike recommended the Popular Culture and Philosophy series to me, and I’m glad he did. It’s a great idea to open philosophical discussions, and explain the concepts, using examples from popular culture. This book contains fifteen essays on the philosophical issues surrounding 007, from what it means to have a license to kill to the objectification of women. It uses a lot of examples from the books, but everything will still make sense if you’ve seen the movies. It did prompt me to buy the first book, though, which I’ll be reading soon.
A whimsical fairly tale for adults. Gaiman let his imagination go wild on this one, and it created a wonderful, winding story. Much better than the movie, in my opinion.
I thought the first half, Magician: Apprentice, was better. I felt like the story spanned over too much time, and the characters changed and became masters so quickly that they almost felt like new characters. I love reading along with characters as they find and develop their new skills, but he basically skimmed over that part. I still really enjoyed it, but I felt like he tried to cover too much in one book.
This was a great book, told from the perspective of an autistic teenager. The narrator takes a lot of interesting tangents while telling the story, and it was just a refreshing read.
When I first started reading this, I couldn’t get over how bizarrely similar it is to Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb. This book was written before Hobb’s, so maybe he inspired her. The beginning setting, the characters and their relationships with each other, the mysterious enemies - so many elements in the stories are mirrored. I almost expected the main characters to run into each other during the first 100 pages. Magician: Apprentice turned out to be a great. I plan to continue on with the series once I get a few books off my to-read list.
Neil Gaiman is quickly becoming my personal hero. I just love the way he tells a story. That said, I think this is one of his weaker pieces. I did enjoy it overall, but I felt it got lost a little in the middle. It has it’s moments, but the plot as a whole is forgettable.
Neverwhere has actually been made into a graphic novel, so I will eventually check that out. I think with some editing and cutting down, just what they’d need to do to turn it into a graphic novel, it could be a great little tale.
Gaman’s view of what the world would have been like if our beloved Marvel characters were born four hundred years in the past. Wicked graphic novel by a wicked author.
A great graphic novel for zombie lovers. Instead of trying to focus on the gore factor that most zombie stories fall into, they’re focusing more of the human reaction of seeing such a disaster. I’ll eventually be picking up the rest of the volumes in the series.
I bought a notebook the other day. This decision was prompted by a post The Struggling Writer made last week. I figure since I’ve started weblogging again, and I’d like to start writing more fiction, I should have something on hand to capture those sudden moments of deep insight. I picked up a small plain Moleskine. I’ve used one before, and it was perfect to carry around and write in. Also, it makes you feel like Hemingway.
I’d like to use the notebook to sketch outlines for stories, write rough drafts for posts, and whatever comes to mind. My main problem with notebooks is that writing in them feels so permanent. When I’m writing a rough draft on my computer, or jotting down a note on a scrap piece of paper, I know it’s only going to exist temporarily. If the idea or rough draft is awful, I can delete it or toss it out. If it’s something I want to continue, the rough draft will fade away as I work on it. In a notebook, it’s there for the life of the book. Until that book is lost, those silly scribblings aren’t going anywhere.
This may not seem like a big issue to most people, and it probably isn’t, but as I said in the comments of the mentioned post, I can’t help but think of the notebook being found a hundred years after I’ve become a world-renown author. Even the thought of a notebook filled with my rough drafts and random thoughts is enough to make me want to crawl under a rock and never come out.
For example, this is what I wrote on a scrap piece of paper in my car while waiting for a red light to change last week, thinking it might be used as a weblog post:
Dear middle-aged, overweight guy jogging down the street in spandex biking shorts,
Is wind-resistance really that much of a issue?
Why?
Lose your bike?
Misshapen junk.
Not exactly the deep insight you’d get from Hemingway, is it?
I find I’m incredibly susceptible to mental blocks. This is something I’ve only become aware of recently, but I think it’s a major cause of my procrastination and literary frustrations.
Sometimes I’ll get an idea in my head, and I just won’t be able to let go of it. It’s often just a vague image, a fleeting memory, a mildly humourous thought, but I have a hard time stepping over it. It will completely block my path until I do something with it, which can often take some time. Some ideas need to grow flesh and skin in my mind, else I risk the chance of uploading a bloody mess of a weblog entry. The problem is while I’m waiting for this idea to grow into something that could or could not be useful, I tend to not do much else. I wait for one idea to succeed or fail before moving on to another.
This isn’t a matter of not being able to multi-task. If I wasn’t able to do that, I would have been fired from my job long ago. I just occasionally get…stuck, I suppose. There’s really no other way to describe it. I think there’s probably two reasons this happens to me.
Firstly, I put too much weight in ideas. Once I get an idea that I think will work for a weblog entry or story, I’m absolutely determined to make it work. I’m afraid to let it slip away and be lost, as if I only have a finite number of ideas at my disposal. I would actually hold onto ideas that I thought were really good, in hopes of developing my skills enough to someday do them justice. I’ve recently discovered that ideas are virtually worthless when it comes to writing. There are millions of ideas out there, and it’s best to just use them up as they come along and make room for the better ideas. Because there will always be better ideas.
Secondly, I’m fairly sure I have a minor case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Very minor, but still there. I displayed symptoms while growing up, but for some reason it just never registered with me. I remember repeatedly having to check the lock on the door when I’d entered the bathroom as a kid. I’d lock the door, look into the mirror, go back and check that the lock had actually locked, look back into the mirror, go back and check the lock, and so on. I’d always do this at least three times, but when I was tired or stressed it would occasionally happen upwards of fifteen times. I had a few other physical symptoms, such as developing a couple of small twitches for a short time when I was a teenager, but I think most of the symptoms were mental. I would just focus on silly, irrelevant things for ridiculous amounts of time.
It wasn’t until I was in university that it suddenly donned on me that this was happening. I remember I was watching the episode of Scrubs where Michael Fox was guest starring as a doctor with OCD. There was a scene where he was washing his hands for hours and couldn’t bring himself to stop. I was thinking to myself that I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to get stuck in a loop like that. I then thought wait a second, I do know what that feels like. I don’t know why it took me so long to think twice about my weird behavior, but once I did it was a startling revelation. All of these examples from my life came flooding into my head. Shortly after that, I shared my amazing discovery with my friend Tanya, to which she responded “well, yeah. Of course you are.”
Interestingly, once I realized that I had a tendency to be obsessive and compulsive, I was really able to pull things together. It was a cause of a lot of social anxiety and stress in my life. When I obsessed about something, I would procrastinate everything else. For example, if I had an event in the evening to go to, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done during the day. My mind would keep focusing back to that event. Once I was aware of what I was doing, I was able to break whatever mental or physical loops I found myself in. I could tell myself to stop checking that lock and brush my teeth or to stop focusing on my final exam tomorrow and finish writing this essay. I was getting a lot more done, and my stress levels dropped dramatically.
Obviously someone with a real case of OCD doesn’t have the option of just stopping themselves. It’s not possible for them to control the disorder. Without medication, many wouldn’t be able to live regular lives. This is how I know I don’t have the disorder. I don’t know what the medical term would be for me. Most likely a spaz.
Anyway, what I have long-windedly been trying to get to is that I was obsessing about writing the same way I obsess about events in my life. I find a good idea, and I focus on it until I write it or until it dies. Once I realized I was doing that, I started to force myself to start another post or story and let the idea grow in the background. Sometimes it will turn into something I want to pursue and sometimes I drop it, but I’m always working on something else on the side.
I think other writers, even those not nearly as spastic as I am, let themselves fall into this trap. Maybe not with minor weblog posts, but when focusing on larger pieces of work, such as a manuscript they’re trying to publish. I’ve chatted with someone who had been trying to get their work published for six months without any bites. He was becoming frustrated and had started to doubt himself as a writer. During those six months of trying to get published, he hadn’t written a single word of new material. He was stuck in a mental loop when he should have been branching out and testing other ideas during that time.
I think maybe everyone is a little obsessive at times, to varying degrees. Just remember to take a step back and see if you’re sticking to the floor from time to time.
I didn’t know about this, but it seems Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are at it again. This time they’re motorcycling from Scotland to South Africa, covering 15,000 miles and 14 countries, in a new BBC series Long Way Down.
I loved their around the world trip in Long Way Round. I watched every episode of the series, multiple times, and tore through their fantastic book. Both, the series and the book, were amazing and really made it easy to imagine yourself struggling down the dirt roads of the Mongolian countryside on your own BMW GS.
The new series airs this fall, and Amazon has their book listed, so we’ll soon have a new adventure with which to follow along. Can’t wait!
The Perfect Swing
