Camp Nano 2012, Words 8,018 to 10,000

Camp Nano intro

Camp Nano 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4 -- 5

(This reaches 10,000 exactly, the number for Day 6, and marks only the third time out of seven I have reached this milestone, and the first time I have reached it within 6 days of writing.)

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If I were a character in a book, I would be introduced in a situation and you could start to make judgments about me based on my behavior and my reaction to certain stimuli. I thought about starting my journal with this approach, but I ended up analyzing every action and reaction I had on the paradigm that I would search out in a fictional character. This frustrates me because that's not what this journal is supposed to be about. But how do you ever write the first journal entry? Especially one several pages long? I know this journal is less for my reader to get to know me as it is I am to get to know myself, but my struggle is that I already know myself pretty well, and I know I have an audience. These are the facts of the situation, and they're causing me no small bit of self-induced anguish. I'm going to have to make some decisions, and so far, the only decision I've made is to have a monologue discussing my discomfort with this piece of assignment.

To be forced to write. The dilemma is that I am being forced to write and I understand that this helps some people, but being forced to write only autobiographical stuff is going to be a huge challenge for me. At some point, I'm going to want to go off and make things up, create some fantastical universe and go walk around in it.

I'd like to rant on something, but I don't have a lot of opinion on things I can think of in the immediate. I like to read other people's rants because of the conversation it inspires and the creativity it implies in order to make a complete and valid argument, especially with attributed sources. Arguments should not be well preserved in time, but instead they should be developed, or fermented. They must reach fruition based on the evidences collected over a period of time, though there are studies I've read about (no attribution here) that suggests that we only remember or even pay attention to the things that we agree with, or that can fit in either support or defense of our argument.

I suppose I just made an argument on a good argument or rant. Great--self-referential writing.

I could try to remember things about my day that I don't usually think about, things like what the light looks like on the wall in the morning, but I actually think about that a lot. We had house once that through a small crack in the window shade, you could see the traffic drive by the front of the house, upside down, on the wall. Our bedroom was a pinhole camera, and we were inside. It was incredibly entertaining. We would sit and watch it for a half an hour if we didn't have to get up  in the morning. I think about that house and that experience often when I wake up in my current room and see the light go across the ceiling from the reflection of the cars--little blurs stretched across a blur of light. The color of the cars indiscernible, where in my past, they were so crystal clear you could tell the make and model of each car, and could have made out the numbers on the license plates, if only you could see that far. I watch the slimes the cars make on the ceiling and remember the other ceiling, and then I get out of bed.

So all that was true, autobiographical, non-fiction. It wasn't too hard to peg out, and I didn't feel like I had to introduce myself in it, because I already know me.

I am writing at the park by the light of lamps, the bugs are kind of ugly in the light, and the reflections off my screen of the cars driving by is kind of irritating. The boys come here sometimes, and some of those times I come with them. The climbing is more interesting in the dark, scrambling up the outsides of the jungle gyms, the rocket ship, not exactly knowing where everyone else is at any given time. They sit on the roof. I am here tonight because I knew there wouldn't be anyone here. It's quieter and I wasn't sure what writing this thing was going to require of me. I'm still not sure. Right now, it's requiring a lot of me making up stuff to write about. And I don't have wi-fi, which means all I really have to do is climb the jungle gym stuff by myself in the dark, or write this. The by-myself stuff does not seem that entertaining. Although, this is not very entertaining either, I'm just on the edge of having my attention pulled away by something else.

Typing in the vicinity of no one is kind of fun. You can look around, there are no people's words to interfere with your own thoughts, and I don't have to see what I'm typing. In fact, I think it would be interesting to turn off the backlight and see how that works out. Fair warning, I won't be editing it because I think the additional time to clean up my writing would be abhorrently tedious. the kind of tedium that leaves a bad taste in your mouth and you discover your brow has been furrowed for an indeterminate amount of time.

The backlight is now off. It's kind of eerie because before I was alone glowing in the darkness, I felt like I was in the woods at a campfire, a personal sized campfire. Perhaps as people who carried candles everywhere they went must have felt.  Personal sized fire. Personal sized computer screen, laptop. Though my computer screen is larger than many early televisions meant for sharing with the whole family. Technology is cool that way. I actually feel less secure, sitting here in the darns. I have less to say, too. The lamppost with the bugs is one of those on again off again varieties that is supposed to save electricity whole still looking like a streetlamp. Not sure why they need these at all, if it can spend any time with the light off, then it should be able to spend most of the time with the light off, and there fore all of the time with the light off, which goes to show that the light is unnecessary altogether. Why DO they have these lights. I'm back in view again, the light is on and I'm kind of in it's cast. My screen is completely useless and I haven't even tried to look at it for some time. That ors for me, I suppose, I am just sitting there, rambling silently in the dark, sensory deprived, visually sensorially deprived…

Does that mean I can sharpen my listening skills? I hear a lot of my tapping, and there is a little bit of traffic though when I hear it i see the headlights pass. I'm kind of getting paranoid, though because I can't see anything including if someone is walking through the park with me. Not with me, but this park that I'm in. I can't delete because I can't see, so I feel a bit awkward correcting my statements. Clarifying my statements.

I don't think I told anyone where I was going. I have autosave, so if I get abducted, at least there is a record of who I am and what I'm doing here. Though I think my computer would be more valuable to steal right off my lap than I would be as an individual. Which is why you should worry about sitting alone in parks at night.

When the light turns off, the bugs must dissipate a bit, because it is only in the complete darkness that I feel them on my hands, fluttering into my vicinity because of the heat generated by my computer.

I went home. I managed to talk myself into severe paranoia. Every time the wind blew, every time a car drove by, every time the light went on, or off, I was staring into the darkness dying to see affirmation that I was indeed in some sort of danger. I totally wasn’t. I think I totally wasn’t. I’m still a little paranoid.

The house is busy doing house things and the boys don’t notice me sitting in the rocker typing away again. I don’t think they notice me often; I find that the house atmosphere is that things happen and you join or you don’t join. Come to think of it, sometimes it is just Jason and me, and Landon is off doing something on his own. I never do anything with just Landon. Maybe I should, sometime. I think that’s how relationships go, though, the boys, or the girlfriend. That could get awkward if I just out of the blue started watching movies with Landon. Maybe I’ll come home early one day and start in on the XboxLive and he’ll join me when he gets home from work. That could work. But then, now that I have this plan to spend time with him, I wonder why I think I need to spend time with Landon at all? Maybe it’s a girlfriend thing where I have to make sure the boys know that the girlfriend doesn’t change everything even though she kind of changes everything. Lord knows the boyfriend changed everything with my girls. Though, I don’t know why I had the girls in the first place--they don’t like gaming, they don’t like cooking and they don’t like playgrounds. They don’t read the same books I read, they don’t shop at the same places I shop, we don’t spend money in the same places. This is not the first time I thought about why I ended up with those girls in the first place. I have explored the idea that they somehow felt sorry for me, or kind of “took me under their wing.” We’re used to each other enough now I don’t see any residual effects of this condescending option.

Being that I’m 300 words short, I’m tired, and I have just found myself rambling on more than one topic, I’m about ready to kill the professor for this assignment. I have to do this thing again tomorrow and I’m gonna start spouting Jack Nicholson’s idle rant All work and no play repeatedly across the page of my paper. I don’t get to crumple it up and throw it out, though, that would be so nice--the tactile experience of acknowledging the complete irrelevance of everything you just did. The digital world causes us to collect so much that we never would in a less technological atmosphere. The thing that people do with their digital photos--as in keep them all indiscriminately--is the same thing writers do with low quality writing. Letters that don’t get sent, half-composed emails, mysterious files with obscure names lost in a labyrinth of nested folders with equally obscure names (that--of course--made sense at the time). Digital era writers have abandoned blog accounts filled with stuff they thought someone might accidentally stumble upon and like, which of course, doesn’t happen in real life. There are internet rules for webcrawling. No one ever accidentally finds a blog. Especially not an amateur “writing” blog, even if it has good writing.

I have gotten very close to reaching my 2000 words for the night and I’m quitting after this paragraph because I’m goofy tired. I have GOT to start this 2000 word project in the morning and work on it throughout the day. I did no other homework.

Camp Nano 2012, Words 7,424 to 8,017

Camp Nano intro

Camp Nano 1 -- 2 -- 3 -- 4

(This post is two people I don't like enough to keep writing. Maybe these two drop out of class. Yeah, that's it.)

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I really don’t like people who manipulate their way into my psyche. Someone mentioned that I should watch the Big Bang Theory and because I tried once and hated it, determined I was less than they were--less open minded, less intelligent, less appreciative of geek humor.  Instead it is that I hate flat characters. So no matter how clever the writing is, if the characters are never going to develop, and they’re not going to challenge me with their own intelligence, then I am not likely to be entertained. But now I can’t stop occasionally thinking about how I should be watching Big Bang Theory just to prove I’m open-minded, intelligent, and find geeks funny.

I feel bad that I’m susceptible to someone else’s judgement of me because of what I do or don’t do. It’s not like they’re struggling with the thought that I’m finding their company less enjoyable because they have to reference Big Bang Theory every time we get together. They don’t even notice. They have the power in the relationship--the power to decide they are right in any case.

I dislike that people have that as part of their personalities. No one should feel intrinsically right. People should have self-recognized limitations. Though, not everyone claims that they can plumb the bathroom sink, but they have the attitude that this cannot be learned.

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My first journal was given to me when I was three, I think. Maybe four. I still have it--it’s been left in the rain, pages have been ripped out, and I can’t read my handwriting. The first few entries were poems my mom wrote down for me and dated. August 12, 1983. They’re pretty cute--pretty good, too for a little kid. Not particularly sweet, like little girls should write, but innocent, goofy. Then I have several drawings scattered throughout the book. You can watch me grow, but not linearly. Then, I got more journals, and you’ll have to jump from book to book, back and forward to go through time in a straight line.

I had a journal for all my sports and endeavors. I think my mom wanted me to chronicle my development through individual projects. It didn’t work very well, though. I ended up with chunks of blank pages and then I picked up all the same scattered habits, back and forth across, multiple days on the same pages, multiple pages with the same dates. Digital journaling has changed the problem--or oddity--of reading non-chronologically, because each of my files are time and date stamped.

I’ve written about all sorts of things, the first few were poems, then drawings, then bits and pieces of stories. A lot about dwarves and elves and trees and flowers.

I’ve written every day for years. This is kind of interesting because I’m introducing me and my journaling to someone who probably doesn’t see someone comfortable with writing a journal.

I like to tell stories. I like to present my life as if it were not my life, to step outside myself and my own opinions and recreate the events of my life from a more objective viewpoint. It helps me not take myself so seriously all the time.

Being that this journal is for a writing class, there is going to be some responsibility to make my journals relevant for my writing development. The difference the purpose of my journal is going to make in what I write in it is already evident. Or, maybe this is just an introduction. I’d prefer that. But I don’t know what to write after the introduction.   

Camp Nano 2012, Words 5,423 to 7,423

Camp Nano intro

Camp Nano 1 -- 2 -- 3

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We watched seven movies this week. Friday night, we slugged our way through a foreign film with subtitles in French. I’m not sure what the original language was. Reading, translating, laughing at jokes that obviously weren’t jokes. Rewinding, retranslating, rewinding to watch the action on the screen. We’ve been to France, enjoyed the general delights young couples enjoy in France (read: we were total tourists) and we learned nearly nothing useful for watching a film subtitled in French. Then we switched over to a French film with English subtitles, and giggled at the translations we knew were wrong, or PC-ized for American sensibilities. Apparently Americans have sensibilities.  I don’t remember the name of either of these movies, though Angela probably does.

Saturday we watched The Wrath of Kahn, Airplane, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, two of which could be considered foreign films, though filmed and produced in English speaking countries. Sunday we watched the Avengers in the theatre as a matinee. Monday we watched Keeping up with the Steins.

Then we went to our Film group. This is the fun part--we watch the films in the chunks we’re supposed to, and then we get together once a week to talk about all the stuff we noticed, and to consider things we hadn’t yet noticed.

Like, Oh, look Airplane! had subtitles, too, and so did Monty Python. Not through the whole thing, but they were there. What part does reading have in watching a movie? That conversation went on for ages.

I love that Angela and I have this we can share. The rest of our week is spent away from each other, or battling over who’s cleaning or who’s cooking. But during the movie, we’re totally together. It’s been fun. We’ve been at this group for two years, now. Each week it’s another member’s turn to choose the movie for the sixth night. This assumes that we have time outside the scheduled movies and everything else to actually fit in watching movies for no reason at all, or we end up just picking movies we wish we had time to watch.

We didn’t start our relationship based on movies. We didn’t meet in the film group, or anything like that. We met at work, part time at Sea World and I was the penguin guy, and she was a flamingo girl. We started scheduling our breaks at the same time and our first date was actually to the dolphin show. She doesn’t count that as our first date, because it was still where we worked, even though we went on a day we were both off. She counts our first date as when I took her out to dinner. It was a simple chain-restaurant affair. I don’t even remember which resturant. Angela probably does. We moved in together some ten or eleven months (depending on which first date you’re counting) after we started going out, and when she was done with her associates degree, we moved out here together. My family is out here and we had somehow managed to agree that the sea life was beginning to feel uncreative.

I started school, and she started working full time in a body shop. Angela got her Associates in something that has to do with being awesome at business, with a minors in repairing dents in cars. Not technically, I don’t remember the technical names for her degrees, but I like mine better. I’m going to school to be a math teacher. I’ve found I don’t like teaching little kids, and furthermore I’m awesome at really hard math so I’m going in for advanced placement for high schoolers. Not a glamorous job, and usually one that leaves the kids beliveing you’re a stiff or crazy or both.

But the movies. So how a body technician and a math teacher end up watching seven movies a week for the sheer social enjoyment of it? I really don’t know. I went into the bookstore, I came out part of a group. There was this guy in the DVD section, and he was talking about all these random movies, and I was just picking up a copy of a book about math systems in other countries, and I walked by and he said, hey, did you see this movie on the shelf? I don’t know if I looked like somebody he had seen browsing or if he was a little weird. The next thing I know, we’re talking like we’d been doing this for years, and I left with a little torn bit of receipt with seven movie titles and a date, time and address.

I don’t know. Maybe watching more movies will make us less tech-y and more approachable. Maybe it will make us geeks. I’m really looking forward to reading this week’s selections. Watching them, rather. I’m not going to fix that because it might mean that maybe the Film Club is a replacement for reading books, since both of us don’t really have time for that anymore. I wish I did, but I’m really digging all the stories. They’re so different, and the storytellers are so precise. It’s like short stories that we studied in Comp 1. Everything matters. Someone chose every little tiny detail.

I like to watch the sets and costumes. The stuff that’s period or sci fi or not just jeans and a t-shirt are my favorite, though t-shirts are pretty cool. I’ve learned to use my t-shirt analysis skills in real life, too. But the sets and costumes--those are intriguing. I start to see little things like if there’s dust in the air in the sunlight. If there’s a curtain tie-back and what it’s made of. If there are finials on the posts of the staircases. If the staircase handrails are worn. If there are shoes under the dress, and if they match or don’t. How many pairs of those shoes are there, and what is the purpose of each? Maybe one is the stunt double for the other, whose job is to be exposed in the parlor from under the edge of the skirt hem. I start to notice if the sleeves seem to match the personality of the person wearing the clothes--puffy, straight, buttoned, french-cuffed, oversized, fitted. It seems like a lot of not-watching-the-movie is going on, but I find I follow the story just fine. No one in the film group does this kind of detail watch, so I kind of filled this role. I don’t think it was a normal thing for me to do right off the bat,  I just kind of watched and listened the first month or so and at first thought that people all talked about similar things, but then I discovered that they were supplementing each other. Some paid particular attention to dialogue, some to foley art, some to hair and makeup, some to period accuracy, some to translation accuracy, some even read the screenplays and brought their literally analysis to the group. People responded to the chimes-in and it enriched the discussion.

The hardest part is not being able to go back after the meeting and watch all seven movies again.  Fitting seven new movies into the schedule is hard enough. I’ve frequently thought that there would or could be a call for a night where we screened clips of what we’ve watched and discussed so that we could experience what others saw all incorporated into ourselves. But the more we listen to each other, the more we start to recognize and find these things in the new selections. I think some people do go back and watch some of the movies, but I also think they don’t have jobs or school.

I think Angela and I are the only couple that shows up, although I know there is something going on between the girl who always wears tights and heels and the guy who chooses the groups of movies. I haven’t decided if they’re an ex couple, a secret couple, or an actual couple. I bet Angela knows, though. Everyone else is either single or their significant others are busy doing something else, indifferent to the nature of the club dynamics, the awesomeness that is something completely divorced from everything else that I do, all the things I have built my identity from for the previous 22 years.

Besides movies, I have a girlfriend of 4 years, I have a chalkboard on my wall so I can work out random math problems, including unsolvable problems. I like things to be true and untrue, so an unsolvable problem is built on something being untrue. This is what the search is for. Which part of this is untrue? Why? I used to eat vegetarian when I was in middle and high school, but I got over that pretty quickly when I moved out of my parents house and discovered really good meat. And seafood. I really really liked seafood when I didn’t have to eat what my parents prepared. Though I stopped again when I worked at Sea World. That felt a bit strange. I wrote for my school newspaper under an alias because my columns were always getting negative attention from authority figures. I would conduct interviews during lunch hours by recruiting people to recruit people to interview for me, so no one actually knew who the author was. I wrote a piece that was a mock-graduation speech for my last publication. I had an editor on livejournal who would proofread what I wrote, which helped keep my bad grammar and spelling from seeping out and giving me away. I’m sure my English teachers would have noticed that. I tried building furniture with the guy down the street from me as a summer job once. I determined that for the safety of humanity, I should never try to actually build something. Theoretical engineering was my limit. The practical people should build and fix my mistakes. I always thought I would try to go into engineering. I did Lego Robotics when I was 15 because it was awesome. But I didn’t like all the time I had to spend not doing facts and figures. All the assembly, the tedium of wiring, that was too much. I read two magazines: the National Geographic because everyone should, and Time because everyone shouldn’t. I don’t know how I ended up getting Time magazine. I don’t think I am ever charged for it. Maybe it is a gift. But I tell them when I move and they keep sending it, so I keep reading it. I have a little sister who is seven years younger than I am and I don’t know her very well. I don’t think she is a vegetarian. Angela wants to try to spend more time with her, but I’d rather wait until she’s graduated and a little less teenagerish. My dad works at a plant making ceramic plates for armored cars. My mom works for the city as a clerk in one of the offices. She’d rather work for the county. I never learned how to cook. I wanted to learn to play an instrument but I never picked one and stuck with it. I picked about seven (rough estimate) and piddled around and went to private lessons for whatever I thought was fashionable that year. I’m allergic to cats, our apartment can’t have dogs, and I never want to see another fish swimming in a glass enclosure as long as I live. Or snail. Or sea monkey. Just say no. I learned to tie my shoe kind of backwards so it’s always a pain to do. I have tried to retrain my muscles but then my shoes are all loose and I really just want to wear shoes, so I deal with it. I prefer my sandals or some flip flops. And jeans and a t-shirt. I have about ten thousand t-shirts, and none of them are plain. I don’t like to wear hats.

Camp Nano 2012, Words 4,265 to 5,422

Camp Nano intro

Camp Nano 1 -- 2

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There are four flies on the window. Flies often rest on the pane of glass between me and the rest of the world, providing something for my eyes to focus on between here and the street, but I have rarely seen more than one fly sit there, walk around, fuzz away and then back.

There are two glasses on my table. One had coffee in it. It still may have coffee in it, but I have not checked it in quite some time. The other is a clear glass of water. I have been sipping on it so long there is no longer ice in it, and the melting of the ice cubes has risen the level of the water so it appears I never drank any at all. Does this phenomenon solve global warming fears of cities flooding along the coasts?

There is only one birthday this month. I have chosen for my nephew an ugly doll. That may be the brand name, but it’s right. It’s ugly. It reminded me of my nephew, not because my nephew is ugly, but because he likes things that are off-kilter and abnormal. I will wrap it in a candy-shape.

There have been twenty hours in today. I have spent them working, including the ones right at the very beginning of the day, and the hours that brought forth daylight, and the hours that warmed the garden soil. I worked through the hours that the children learned things in school, and I have worked through the hours the teens were slammed at the fast food restaurants with the dinner rush. I stayed on call through the class where this writing was assigned. And I’m working now, standing at a table, typing into a laptop, keeping an ear on the audio broadcasts. The phone is near my right hand, and a pencil, and a pad of paper.

There are only so many days in a row. There must be days in between. My days last full days, and I get four of them separated by sleep. Then I have the days in between. My last day in between was spent with my nephew fishing. He likes to fish, or maybe he doesn’t, but he doesn’t treat it like the end of the world. I think he may like to fish. My next days in between will be for housekeeping. I think I have plants. I don’t remember. This probably means I don’t have any anymore if I ever did.

There are times when the silence is so loud, especially when surrounded by daylight because the senses are receiving incongruous data. The eyes should receive as little information as the ears. This is balanced. But daylight radio silence, still days, days with only a bit of wind and the traffic is low because no one is still in town, silence is cold, eerie.  It is dark and noisy tonight. The chatter is not for me, though I break from writing often to direct. The men who work under me are quick and do not require much direction. They are not like children.

There are two more hours until it is time for bed. I will go home, I will kiss my children. They will be sleeping. They may wake up to wrap their arms around my neck and kiss me back. But probably not. I will kiss my wife. She will not stir. She will have set my alarm for me. She will have set out my clothes for after my shower. She will kiss me in the morning when she gets up, but I will not wake, either. She will make my breakfast and set it to warm in the oven. She will shoo the children to school. She will go to work. She will not be home when I get up, when I eat, when I dress, and when I come back to work. She will send me a text or two throughout the day.

But she will be there when I get back again after my long shift. She will have shooed the children to school again and she will go in to work late.

The phone rings often. I make calls often. I often forget what it was I was going to type. It is like listening to a jazz compilation album, called, “One From Each Genre.” But you can’t finish any of the songs, you can only skip ahead after fifty bars of music.

It’s raining now. There’s plenty of water on the ground already. Too much water--the water table has risen to the level of the roads and the plants are beginning to turn yellow on the ends. It’s getting people nervous. There are articles in the papers. There are pieces in the news. It’s showing up in the political stage. People’s flower gardens are getting ruined. There are tickets being issued if you run your sprinklers. The drainage holes in the streets are cleaned once a day. There is so much water, the carpet cleaner businesses are hiring temporary workers because people have basements, and the basements are flooding. Every basement is flooding. There is water over the road in some places. The school buses must go around.

There are two churches I’ll pass on my way home tonight. One has a midnight service every day. I’ll occasionally stop in instead of heading straight home. The man behind the podium talking is short. He speaks in a quiet voice. He’s the kind of guy that would get ignored in a bar. He’s smart. He speaks as if he’s been places and like he’s preparing everyone to come with him on a road trip. It’s a long journey, and we’ll be going far, far away. He really treasures the opportunity he has to discuss his discoveries. I like to listen to him. If I had to go on a long long mysterious journey, he would be someone I would want to go with. I don’t go to any of the other services at any of the other times that I get off work on other days on my on weeks.

There is only one of me. I spend most of my time alone. I drive alone, I sleep alone, I work alone. When I shop, I shop alone. When I watch a movie, I am usually alone. Unfortunately, it goes to follow that my wife is also alone, alongside me. The long hours push us apart, but we work hard to make our relationship rich and full. We try not to make anything usual or normal. We do something different every day on my off weeks.

I’ve written twenty-seven notes on my notepad since I’ve returned from class.  About fifty people have come through this room. And four flies are still spending their evening in this room with me. I’ve drunk about 3 glasses of water. I’ve answered nearly a hundred calls. I’ve placed twelve.

Camp Nano 2012, Words 2,108 to 4,264

Camp Nano intro
Camp Nano 1

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I wasn't really paying attention in class. I know, great thing to admit on the first diary entry to a professor who requires me to write a diary. Journal. What is the difference between a diary and a journal? My dictionary, which I got off the shelf instead of using some online bit, says a diary is "1. a record of events, transactions, or observations kept daily or at frequent intervals: JOURNAL; esp: a daily record of personal activities, reflections, or feelings. 2: a book intended or used for a diary" and a Journal is: "1. a) a record of current transactions; esp: a book of original entry in double-entry bookkeeping B: an account of day-to-day events C: a record of experiences, ideas, or reflections kept regularly for private use, d) a record of transactions kept by  deliberative or legislative body e: LOG 2 a: a daily newspaper b: a periodical dealing esp. with matters of current interest 3: the part of a rotating shaft, axle, roll or spindle that turns in a bearing."

So by not paying attention in class, I've discovered I really don't have any idea what to write. What am I supposed to be writing here? What I did today? What I think? What are reflections? (Actually asking this question, so I'll leave a bit of a blank or you can just email me, Mr. Bussy. In the meantime, this first week is going to be a list of things I have done each day, and what I feel about them.







I always wake up before my alarm clock goes off, even if I set my clock for earlier. This drives me nuts. I've been trying to train myself to trust that my alarm will go off for YEARS. Maybe it's not a trust issue. Maybe I just have an awesome timekeeping brain. But if that's true, I don't know why it takes longer to drive everywhere than I think it's going to.

I have two dogs and they usually start moving around when I start moving around, and if I don't let them out right away they start whining. I hate whining. I want to beat them stupid when they whine. I don't, though. I just let them outside. I try to remember to let them out right away because I don't like starting my day really angry. I got them out and fed and everything pretty quickly today, so I didn't have to bother with the whining or their impatience. I hate dogs sometimes. They should be less demanding.

After dealing with the dogs I made coffee. I wish I could train them to know I will help them after I make coffee. That the smell of coffee equals an open door. Maybe if I got an automatic coffee machine and set it up to brew when I'm getting up. But then I would have coffee when I wanted it anyway, so I suppose I should just get a new coffee machine. Look, diarying made me learn something. Journaling. Whatever.

I really hate getting dressed in the mornings. i don't work or go anywhere until the afternoons, so getting dressed in the morning is like choosing extra clothes to wash. But since I don't wear pajamas, I don't have to wash those anyway. So it took me like 20 minutes to figure out what to wear. Another annoying thing about working later is that I can't take a shower first thing unless I want my hair to get all flaky and gross. I have to take a shower in the afternoon before I go to work anyway and two showers a day would be terrible for my skin. Ew.

I don't eat breakfast, but drink coffee with cream and sugar and that seems to tide me over until lunch. Usually I check my email first thing in the morning while drinking my coffee. Today I didn't though. I washed dishes first, and then checked my email. I don't usually wash dishes except once a week. I don't know why today was different.

I didn't have anything interesting in my email. And I thought they used like "interest tracking" programs to advertise to me things I would be interested in. I wish I could kill all those high-heel ads. I hate high heels. I have three pairs of shoes. None of them are for being taller. Or for falling over. Or whatever people buy those awful shoes for. I did have a coupon for something I don't care about, so I finally unsubscribed from that newsletter.

I had some errands to run so I had to wrangle the dogs and feed them lunch and put them back outside and make sure they had water, and I scooped all the poop because it needed to be done and then I washed the bottom of my shoes and got them all wet anyway and left them on the porch to dry.

I had to go to the bank, the grocery store, the post office, and the auto parts store. I like the people at my bank, and chose a grocery store kind of out of my way because I like the people there better, and I hate the people at the post office. I don't really have an opinion of the people at the auto parts store because I don't go there very often. The bank has free suckers, the grocery store does free produce samples, and the post office charges for everything, except those flat rate boxes because the price of the cardboard is built into the flat rate, I bet. Sometimes I take them and never ship anything in them, I just use them for giving gifts. Someone could use them for shipping, I guess. I always take something free when I go to those places, except the post office because I really don't need that many things. I had to buy a light bulb for my car. My car is really easy--you open the trunk, pop off the little shielding, and unscrew the bulb from the back. All cars should be this easy, but the one I had before this one wasn't . I don't' know how to change the front bulbs, but I bet it is also as easy. anyway, it saves on labor. I picked a cherry dum dum today.

I had to do some reading before work. I borrowed this book from the girl I work with and I wanted to give it back because I had it for a long long time, but I didn't even try to read it yet. So I got about ten chapters read before I had to shower and spend another 20 minutes choosing something to wear and then drive to work. I do after school daycare. These kids just need someone to watch them for the one or two hours before their parents get off work and can come pick them up. These kids can't go home to an empty house, and most of them only have one parent. Or separated parents. Anyway, no one is home. Today we make hopscotch out of carpet squares with pictures on them so we could scramble them up and make different patterns. Kids can do the same thing for an hour if they can move around and then do it differently, and use their imagination to change the rules and stuff.  We taped the pictures onto the squares, things we cut out of coloring books or magazines. So you can jump on a bear, or a woman's head, or an iphone. Instead of counting, they have to say out loud the think they're jumping on. Well, they started getting crazy and making up things like "say the first letter of the thing you're jumping on" and then they started a game where you had to say someone in their class who would like the thing and they had pretty good fun with all that. Some kids went home before that game was completely bored with. After that game, we did some legos and built tall skinny towers. We usually try to measure them, but today we just split the legos by color and built things as tall as ourselves. I like legos because you don't' really have to watch the kids, they just seem to be as wrapped up as you are with them. The rules with the legos is that they have to get put away before you go home, and today when we got them all put away they were stripes of color. I will listen tomorrow to see if anyone things that was particularly fun or cool.

Once all the kids go home, I go over to my friend's house and help her stuff envelopes. Somehow she got this job where you print stuff they email you and fold it and put it into envelopes and then you print labels and stick them on the front and drop them in the mail. I'm not sure how this is a whole job but apparently people pay for this. She gets to watch soap operas during the day while she prints and folds and sticks. She uses a sponge to seal them. I haven't figured out how to use the sponge to not make the envelope all wet and gross. But I help her and she buys me some delivery for dinner and it's a pretty fair trade. We talk about lots of stuff while we do it. She has a daughter somewhere in Denver. She lives with her dad and step mom. I don't' know why she doesn't live with her mom but I've never met her and Jenny and I have been friends for a long time. Sometimes Jenny goes over to visit. Once I thought maybe the daughter was given up for adoption but Jenny gives her presents and stuff and has her picture up on her wall and talks about all the things she does, so I think she didn't. it makes me wonder about Jenny though, how she doesn't even have custody of her own daughter even for like a week or the weekends or anything. I sometimes wonder what is wrong with Jenny--like, did she beat her daughter when she was a baby? Did she do drugs? Is she crazy? But Jenny and I get along just fine. Today we ordered burritos from the Chipotle place and those were good. I like that it's not all Chinese. I didn't know there were so many places you could order food from.

So I left Jenny's early to go to writing class, where I got this assignment and had the class and looked at all the people in the class. It makes me feel really young taking an evening class like this because all the people  are parents and old and stuff. I think there might be one other freshman in the class. I mean, 18 year old freshman. Some of those people might be freshman too but that just sounds weird. So I doodled in my notebook and wrote down peoples names and things they liked because I like to do that with people and that's part of the reason I'm taking the class. The other is that I want to write short stories but mostly I want to write about people. Then it was time to go home and I realized I hadn't taken any notes on what my homework was but I remembered this 2000 words a night thing so i started writing tonight as soon as I got home and now I've written. I don't' know how to count my words so I'll just stop here today and maybe ask someone tomorrow or google it. But I'm too tired tonight to try to write any more so if I'm not at 2000 I'm sorry, but I'm just tired and don't want to look in all the menus for a word count thing.

Before I go to bed I will let the dogs in and out, lock all the doors, and turn on the bedroom fan. I will think about my coffee machine magically making coffee for me in the morning just in case it works and I'll set my alarm at the same time and hopefully I will convince myself I do not have to worry botu it going off because it went off yesterday and today just like it was supposed to. And then I'll do it all again. Which will be a boring diary entry. I really have to figure out something to write.

Camp Nano 2012, Words 1 to 2,107

Camp Nano intro


********************
I really don’t like writing everyday. I really don’t.

But, here I am, with this little assignment. He thinks it’s a little assignment but I believe he has no idea how much time I don’t have to be writing 2,000 words a day. I remember when I was in college the first time, that professors seem to be oblivious to the fact that each of their students are taking many many classes at the same time, and each of these classes have professors that think that they are the only professor for each student...but I blew that all off based on the idea that they’ve done it all before and they’d have to reevaluate themselves and their teaching styles every year (I remember this fact from my parents being professors at the college in our county in Missouri.) and if this strategy hadn’t worked for them before, they wouldn’t be doing it now. So then, my first time around in school, I puttered through all the classes and tried to fit in sleep between all their requirements.

But, here I am, with this little assignment, 2,000 words a day for someone who probably can’t read the 50,000 words a day they expect from this class as a whole, and since we turn it in once a week, that’s Okay I’m terrible at arithmetic but the point should be clear. I’m guessing I could copy and paste some Lorem ipsum and fill up a portion of my word count requirements with that and he wouldn’t even notice, except that if I were a professor receiving a digital copy of someone’s journal with a word count requirement I would do a search of the document of the phrase Lorem ipsum and discover that people are too stupid to start about a paragraph from the top to avoid getting caught.

But, here I am, writing instead of cheating, which would be easy because I know the tricks to not getting caught at using filler for 2000 words of mumbling filler that designers use and copywriters replace. I’m being a copywriter. I’ve decided to remove the Lorem ipsum from my writing and to fill it with copy.

Yeah. So here I am, with this little writing assignment, five years after my first attempt at college, and the professors seem to still be acting like they’re the only people I am responsible to on the planet. I’ve got children, I’ve got a job, I’ve got a husband. I’ve got clients, and I’ve got other teachers. This is not the only thing I have to do in a day. 2,000 words a day, on top of all my other writing assignments for this professor--I’m guessing I’m going to be doing a lot of brainstorming for my  writing assignments in these 2,000 word journals.

And I don’t care if he doesn’t read it and I’m going to treat it as if he’s not going to. I’m going to write whatever and be less concerned with the way it comes across because it’s never going to go across to anyone other than--well, I doubt if I’ll ever read this again so It’ll just sit in on some data field on a computer disk--lonely, ignored, and barren. And a copy of it will live on a data field on a computer on some server in Milwaukee, or somewhere. And a copy of it will live on a data field on the computer server at the college, until the professor quits, gets fired, or dies and they purge his accounts.

Speaking of fired professors, and since I’m only 3/10 of the way to my word count (and I got that math right), one of my mentors from school the first time around got fired this past year. Why? because of the evaluation process mentioned above. If you can’t self evaluate, no matter how amazing you are, you can’t make it through year after year of the same curriculum approach. As much as I feel sorry for him, I do not feel like he was unjustly fired. He just does not fit in a system that expects uniformity.

Whatever is next for him will probably require a similar amount of systemic self molding. Or some. Probably some. I don’t know...I really liked him for his lack of moldability. He did what he did on his own terms, and his ideas resulted in some really great thoughts coming out of his students--at least the ones capable of thought. At the time I was young enough I just wanted to listen to him talk and listen to the things other people said, and when I got to the point when I had to assert my own ideas, I felt prepared to format my thoughts in an original way, and feel confident that I was thinking with originality, and speaking with originality, and challenge the expectations of the professor I was writing for.

Writing about other people’s writing taught me a lot; I am quite proud of my work as an analyst of character, of motivation both of the individual created within the black and white on the page as well as the individual who used the pen to create the other. But I think this ability has been instilled in me from the beginning--not just through schooling. I look back and see that growing up at the same table as parents grading papers and listening to their exchanges about the people in their classes. Sometimes they’d have the same person in their classes and they’d discuss that person--like this one guy. He would do great in my dad’s class, but terrible in my mom’s. She started asking dad about what things he would write in his papers for him, how the sentences were constructed. I always suspected my mom was a harsher grader than my dad, but for some reason this guy’s inability to pass in her class baffled my parents.  My dad would tell about the way they discuss things, the time he’d give the students to finish the assignment, and the percentage of my dad’s own rhetoric that came back in the student’s paper versus the student’s original work. They never actually traded this student’s papers between them, though, which I was always waiting for. I expected to hear one day, as I was studying in my room, that my mom would exclaim, YOU GAVE HIM A WHAT?! ON THIS PAPER?

She never did, though. They kept that particular distance, they respected that each of them was correct in their grading of their independent students. I never understood, though, because it would explain for so many of the students they shared did better in his class than hers. But anyway, this one guy. They started talking about what this guy might like and dislike. See, dad taught a series of classes on history, and my mom taught classes on anthropology. You’d think theyd’ be really similar, but even when they covered the same period of time and the same people, their approaches were so totally different.  My mom was so buried in the individual people and their needs and wants causing their actions, and my dad was all about politics, and the needs of the society causing the actions. I figured this difference out early. My mom would always decide what it was that I was trying to do based on my history, my environment, my health. She always seemed sympathetic to me, and then assigned punishment anyway. It drove me nuts. Dad, though, just saw right through my lies. He saw manipulation, rationality where my mom saw emotion. And he calmly assigned punishment. Example? I could write a novel of examples. This one time, I had to walk home from school because I was told that the event I planned on going to instead of taking the bus home was not an approved event. I was actually told to walk home. So I started on my journey, but not until I had called a friend to give me a ride. It seemed innocus enough, except that my mom, having expected one mile out of fifteen walked woudl be enough punishment, decided to come pick me up. When I arrived home in my friend’s mom’s car some five minutes after my mom had left to get me, my dad promptly grounded me from seeing said friend. they had simply started out trying to punish me for disregarding their authority on whether I had permission on staying at school or not. My mom understood why I wanted to go, and how I managed to miss the bus by deciding to make the call to ensure they knew the change in plans, and her decision to come and get me along the way was based on the idea that she knew fifteen miles was too severe a punishment in my eyes, and probably would cause more detriment than results. My dad, however, saw the “ensure they knew the change in plans” part and knew I probably had plenty of time to call and make the bus when my plans were rejected, but that I postponed the call to be perfectly timed with the departure of my ferry home, in order to garner the positive response I had wanted. And then, I turned the punishment itself into a battle of wills, and willed myself out of the simple punishment by cheating my way through it, Tom Sawyer style. Let someone else do the work for me--that’s what he saw.

Of course, at the time none of this made sense to me. I was sixteen and wanted not to go home, but to go to this totally safe, school sponsored event, crawling with chaperones. This was the kind of thing teens’ parents let them do on short notice. So I notified them, and when I was turned down I was so very very baffled. Unable to figure a way to go anyway without getting grounded from school itself, I decided the best course of action was not to disobey the parents and to get myself home. So I got myself home. I walked about a quarter of a mile after my call to a rescue entity before my friend’s mom picked me up and drove me the rest of the way home, saving me from near certain hit-and-run accidents that replayed in my mind, not to mention the blisters I would have gotten had I survived the walk instead.

Turns out teenagers and their parents don’t really have a lot in common. This is coming back around to me as I wait at home for my own teenagers to show up after school. I remember the walk I never took as if I had actually walked it. The misery of the punishment for my series of apparently bad decisions never left me, though the full details and the ability to understand my parents has obviously evolved as I grew older. Instead though, I take from this that there might actually be some logic in what the kid is saying. It is indeed possible to put seventeen unrelated factors together and come up with a valid reason she skipped class. It’s not a good reason, but it’s valid, provable, supportable. So I have to show the flaw in the reasoning. My job is not to punish right and wrong, but to teach reasoning.

Which brings me back around to the Lorem ipsum part of this writing assignment. I don’t understand the reasoning for all of this chatter and whether it’s appropriate for me to give up two whole hours of my day to yammer into a computer without interruption. But I’m smart enough now not to just skip it; the fact that I have no idea why I have to do this does not mean there is a lack of reason. It just means I’m ignorant of his reasoning. I’m willing to give a self-centered professor the benefit of the doubt--obviously not without my own juvenile, pre-formed opinions glued to it with rubber cement like in grade school--and go along with the work. I’ve always done that, at least, whether it proved fruitful or beneficial. I’m bound and determined to get something out of this, if it kills me. Or the plants I should have watered and the fish and dogs I should have fed and the kids that I was supposed to pick up after school but I sent them a text and told them to find something interesting to do for two hours before coming home because I needed to work in quiet.

Camp Nano June 2012

So I got wrangled into trying to write 50,000 words this month. See, it was first going to be in July, but it turns out they're not doing Camp Nano in July, just June and August, and the thought of doing it in August was not a pleasant one--especially if I do manage to get time to go on a road trip. So I was just going to do it in July anyway, but my friend is doing it in June and just kind of told me to do it with her. (I vaguely remember there was fake whining involved.)

So I am going to write 25 different characters, each with at least 2,000 words. The premise is that these 25 people are in the same writing class, and they've all been assigned to write in a journal every day--2,000 words a day (convenient huh?). I will be presenting the first entry in each person's journal. This way they're all introducing themselves, and they're all reacting to the same stimulus.

This is fiction, but if it looks like I might be telling a story that actually happened, I probably am. It's a lot easier for me to write non-fiction than fiction, but I'm trying to frame all of this in fiction, so that any super awesome characters I create, or any that I fall in love with, can be fully capable of surviving anything I throw at them without the burden of being "what-ifs." I really don't want to consider what I would do in certain situations, but what my invented characters would do.

So welcome to Camp Nano, June 2012.

I'm sorry if I'm not really original in coming up with titles for each of the chapters.