Minutae

-Typing with acrylic nails on is a challenge, but much less of one than I thought it would be.
-Having guests in my home is awesome -- I love how conducive the space is to sitting down and talking.
-Having someone come by and offer to maintain my yard every other day, after being met with refusal upon refusal, is somewhat less awesome.
-I found forks! And a drawer I didn't know that I had.
-Smoking cloves nearly exclusively has not only made me cut back on how much I smoke, it also makes the experience more pleasurable.
-I need to figure out what the hell I'm going to write about next month. I'm thinking about weaving together different experiences characters have in coming to figure out how institutionalized education works, and how they come to be educated, or not.
-The hundred words thing has fallen by the wayside in favor of writing something, anything, as long as it exceeds one hundred words, or is prep work for November's novel.
-That said, I made an attempt at the hundred words tonight and failed miserably, but I don't have the heart to cut it down.
It is as follows:

She was averaging two steps per minute – I couldn't help but count. The thud of the walker, then a tiny step. Moments later, another thud followed by another step. She had a tool belt attached to that grey implement – a brilliant idea, she had thought. Sitting down to dinner, she lifts the fork, slowly, tentatively, stabbing at the mass of mushy food on her plate, slipping about, dropping more than she eats. After thirty minutes, and hardly more than three bites, she struggles to rise. Then the thud-thump of walker and slipper, as she makes her way to the den, to watch the Braves. Baseball is a religion, you know. I clear the table and wash the plate, and wonder on my hands and knees where yet another fork has wandered off to, crawling around the dining room.

But after the Braves, after I'd gone home, and after numerous thud-thunks later, she made her way into the kitchen, the forks from more than a weeks worth of dinners tucked away in her tool belt, mustered the strength to stand long enough to wash and dry them all, then wrap them in numerous layers of paper towels, and tuck them away in a drawer that I'd never noticed.

Tonight, I found that drawer, and all the old utensils, unwrapped them and integrated them into the hodge-podge of things in my cutlery drawer, and the house feels a bit more a home for her and my effort.

On modern entertainment

Let's examine for a moment our cultural fascination with capital-”E”-Entertainment – thank you, David Foster Wallace. In his novel, Infinite Jest, Wallace conceives of a form of entertainment so potent and affixing that its viewer is rendered incapable of movement, eventually dying, presumably of some combination of malnutrition, dehydration, and sleep deprivation. I don't think we're there quite yet, but I do think that some of our favorite forms of keeping ourselves amused are also means of sedation and placation. Think about it – the television is front and center in most any American home; the more recent designs are rather evocative of altars. As a delivery mechanism for information as much as for entertainment, electronic media have no rival. The challenge we face societally, though, is similar to that of what many religious communities face – we place more value on (worship) the message and our means of obtaining it in place of looking to see what lies behind that message and examining it to hear whether or not it rings of truth.

I worry, though, that we may have gone beyond merely forgoing our critical reasoning skills in favor of having our heads and hearts filled with pre-manufactured contentment – we seek to emulate that which we observe. How else to account for the ubiquity of “social-networking” sites subsequent to the rise in popularity of reality television? Such sites allow one to imagine his largely dysfunctional and drama-ridden reality as a reality drama. The user of any such site is enough removed from his life by being forced to describe his relationship status, likes and dislikes, etc. in nearly binary terms. Single, or not. If it's not a “favorite” song or movie, don't talk about it. In being so removed, we become mere observers in the lives of our friends and loved ones, and, perhaps even more urgently, in our own lives, too.

Maybe that is the real danger of this Entertainment, and where its poison lies – we die of loneliness, wrapped in imagined activity and companionship. And maybe that's why I'm scaling back on the Internet this month, in addition to the practical and financial benefits.

Today's hundred

She was at that age where she listened to a song on loop for hours on end, as if repetition made the words and tones more poignant. And of course it did – she used the same method in studying and was well on her way to being valedictorian of her class. Yet on each play, the song meant less and less. The lyrics were inane. The chord progression was all-too-predictable. The song was as quickly part of her consciousness as her biology lesson – and as quickly forgotten.

Maybe she thought something would finally break after so much use.

So. . .

It's the end of October. I have certain promises made and rules set that must be met concerning publication. Additionally, I have a severe lack of material and momentum. So, should I do NaNoWriMo? Will it motivate me? Will I give up and fall flat on my face within a week?

The tentative plan is:
1. For the next week, I will do the 100 words project. (Micro-fiction, whee!)
2. Come Halloween, we'll see.

In the course of going through my grandmother's and great-aunt's house yesterday, looking for furniture that I could potentially use in my own home, I ran across what is apparently my first attempt at poetry, ever. It is as follows:

Cats
Pat about the house,
And you can pat
A cat.
Now,
How about that?

My great-aunt Mimi's handwriting is on the back: "Beth, age 4." There are also two stick figure cats on the work.

I really don't think my writing ability has improved appreciably over the past 18 years, and I'm a little bit scared of that fact.