Maybe numb is a better word. Yesterday's mass shooting didn't happen here in Puerto Rico, but it may as well have. It took place in one of Orlando's most popular, most frequented LGBT clubs on that club's most popular most frequented night: Latin Music Night. The club is typically packed on latino night and there's a line waiting to get in. The roster that is slowly being released of the people who died is almost exclusively filled with names like Gutierrez, Guerrero, Ocasio, Sotomayor, Santiago, Fuentes, Davila, etc. And Orlando's latin community is overwhelmingly a Puerto Rican community. My Facebook feed is strewn with people I know posting about the loved ones they lost, the family that is dead, the friends they will never see again. I know it didn't happen here, but it feels like it did. I'm fed up of people and their opinions on my life. I don't think I can hear one more person who doesn't have a fucking clue what they are talking about, tell me their opinion that gay is a choice. I would never in a million years presume to tell a woman that I think I have a better idea of what womanhood is about than she does. I would find it unconscionable to inform a black person about his or her experience as a black person. I would never do these things, and not even because they would be offensive things to do, but because it would be completely illogical for me to do so. With no footing in real-world experience, how could I think to opine? I'm really tired of this fight. I'm tired of feeling like I have to prove to anyone the autonomous validity of my existence. If you're reading this and thinking that I should have to, then fuck you.
View attachment 22955 It's a random parking lot, right? Doesn't get more random than that. Not even any people in it. Just cars. This was the view from my room at the DLIFLC in Monterey, CA shortly before I graduated. The Army had just given us (the Air Force) space in their newer (at the time) quarters that were kinda' up the hill, like going toward the PX. The rest of the USAF students were housed in one of the much older barracks style buildings down the hill. That little VW square-back sedan you see there was mine. About a week after I took this photo the '89 Loma Prieta earthquake happened. I had never felt anything like it. My roommate was a strange little dude named Don, who was actually a really nice guy. Across the way lived a fellah' who was in the Army and who was in my class named Mike. We dated for a while. One day he just started hanging out with me and we became inseparable. He ended up washing out and I felt terribly for him. He tried really, really hard and we studied together endlessly, but frustration would get the better of him. He was also painfully socially awkward in that timid, held-back sort of way. He had a hard time talking to people and participating in class. Just a day in the life.
... the year of worrying over cliché. And it's spilling over into 2016. The year I joined this forum, 2008, was the year of the Vampire, and ostensibly, still the year of the waning H.P. It was all vampires, all day, all night, fangs, blood, and sparkle. Members pondered vampires attending a secret hidden Vamping School for special vamp children where a plucky little trio of vamps (two fellahs and their oh-so-bright gal-pal) learned the ways of vamping, all the while fighting a secret war against an evil Dark Vampire Overload trying to ruin everything. Vampity, vampity, Gryffindor! 2015 was the year of passionate worry over cliché. Everyone has a pretty unique story they are working on. Ideas are all over the map, all of which would be excellent and fine and wondrous, yet the fear of cliché has taken hold in the hearts of would-be writers and is twisting their meat-pump painfully. It's all been done, friends. All of it. The story about a gay vampire wizard fighting his way through a maze to get to the Capital City to kill the evil President who wants to squash the Vampnegation Faction in District 37 and eradicate all the Divergevamps, it's been written. It's out there somewhere. Stop worrying about the props of your story and start wondering WHY you are writing your story. Do you have a reason to write it? Through your story is there something you want to say, or better yet, ask? No, not a fucking brow-beating polemic. It doesn't have to be dialed up to a ten. But it shouldn't be a zero either. There are numbers in between, you know. </rant>
I have a fascination with concepts and topics that hold a strong tendency to divide people into camps. The fascination lies in what is it about these particular topics that touch the berserk button in some people, where other topics don't possess the same ability. Maytag vs. Whirlpool *Who cares? Which one's on sale?* Apple vs. Android *ICBM's launch in both directions, mutual destruction assured* Mac vs. PC *Each side sends in a HALO team to take out the opposing Command Center* MS Word vs. Scrivener *Propaganda Machines thrum to life to send their indictments of heresy and treason* Gay vs. Straight *The seeds of cultural destruction are seen on both sides from both respective sides. Cthulhu is come.* ... and so it also seems with planning and pantsing. Hard to even ask an innocent question of the other side, out of simple curiosity, without saliva splattered brick-bats being brought to bear. Frankly, I think that for all the investment, it seems more intuitive that the dynamic answers to one similar to that of sexuality. Lots of reasons to pick a camp, yet lots of un-admitted visitation to the opposing side. View attachment 22943
Agency is my new un-favorite trending word across the internet. I'm seeing it everywhere, and everywhere I am seeing it misused. It falls into a bucket of un-favorite words that immediately prickle my skin because, outside of certain venues of conversation (like here in our forum where the word has a direct and important application) it's the sort of word people pull out in a kind of cerebral dick-measuring contest, hoping to exclude other participants by dint of vocabulary intimidation. Also, it's being mutated into a dull synonym for simple responsibility, or worse, as a way of expressing a shield against accountability in action by claiming "no agency". "Couldn't be helped. Not accountable. I do what I want and then I will flash the agency card and you can go fuck yourself." Words... The very trend of "word trending" amazes me a bit. The internet and its ability to speed up certain processes makes it possible, as a linguist, to witness changes in meaning in a word that once took decades or centuries under prior linguistic paradigms, that now take only weeks or days as the chain of use across the data-sphere degrades or shifts the meaning of a word in a given direction.
Now, before proceeding further, it's important to note that we are all dicks at one time or another. And it's also important to note that I think there's a difference between being a bitch (all genders can be bitches) and being a dick (all genders can be dicks). So, why? Why be a dick? Many of us can look back at recent dickery in which we engaged and probably excuse away the act by showing that it was an escalation. It wasn't dickery here, but by about here we're probably entering into the dick zone, and by this point here it was full on penis fencing, no doubt, but I was already in it, balls deep, so... whatcha'gonna'do? But that's not always the case. Sometimes we dive right in, penis first. There's no build-up, there's no escalation, no foreplay; it's hardcore dickery from word go. What's the economic model that explains this? Do Level 1 Dicks (dives in dick first) really see an outcome scenario that is better or benefits them more than a non-dick, or someone who just found themselves in the heat of the moment suddenly being a dick (we'll call that Level 2 Dick)? Or does the economic model (to which I nearly always repair in any discussion about anything) not apply? Has intolerance to dickery forced Level 1 Dicks to the surface, kinda' the way religious extremism makes otherwise quiet atheists into vocal atheists for getting smooshed into a corner? Are people able to be frank and honest about their dickery? Is it a topic that suffers too much from emic-only data loss? What do you think?
I'm giving my dog her afternoon treat of part of a container of Beneful Prepared Meals and without thinking, after I scoop out her little portion, I stick the spoon in my mouth to mouth it clean. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Grow up. It's just food. And the Beneful brand actually looks pretty appetizing. There's real veggies in it. The works. So, after laughing softly to myself at the fact that I ate some of her food and realizing that, at least as far as this brand goes, it's actually not bad tasting at all, I begin to wonder (like any good writer would) if I were in a situation where there was nothing else, would this stuff sustain me? It wouldn't be ideal, of course, it's for dogs, but if push came to shove and some craziness happened that didn't let me have access to regular food, could my pooch and I share and get by? So, I go looking on the web and clearly I'm not the first person to think this thought because Google fills in the question before I've typed the first 4 words. I click the first listing and I see some very sensible answers concerning nutritional content and differing opinions on wet, canned food versus kibble because of hydration issues and the like. All very mature and adult, and then there comes the comment that throws me. Someone indicates having tried it "for what it is to come". I keep reading and more and more comments to the tune of inevitabilities and eventualities and... I scroll back up and sure enough the logo at the top of the forum is a stylized human head wearing a big double canister gas mask. I'm in a "prepper" forum. FFS... A few days before, I had reason to want to know when marriage licenses of any kind first started being issued in the U.S. I pop into this site and it starts off looking like it might be informative until you scroll down just a tad and start seeing shit like this: And I'm like, great, I'm in yet another whack-job website. It happens all the time! Why are they always at the top of the lists? Doesn't that usually mean that these are the most searched sites? What gives? Do people really want to search crazy-people sites when they have random questions rather than get their info from more reasoned minds? I know you might be thinking, "Well, Wrey, if you think about it, both of those questions do seem rather primed to pull up some sketchy sites," to which my answer is is, forget Adult Content filters on my web browser. The odd boob or peen doesn't freak me out in the least. I want a whack-job filter to filter out sites that contain certain words or phrases. I don't want to see sites that contain the words "end of days", "the coming of the fall", "liberals are...", "conservatives are...", "make sure your shelter is at least 20 feet underground and..." None'a that do I want to see. Sheesh!
Window of mystery into history, through your pane no one looks. A river of knowledge; no need for college. Questions, answers, ponderings, books. Though frosted you seem in this digital dream, you need only click, thus to seek. And know all these thoughts, like boiled-over pots, boil over at least thrice a week. Throw back the blind on this window through time. Yes, you. I double-dog dare you. It's off to the right; a tool, not a blight. Be the first, if you've a care to.
So yesterday I was watching a very interesting documentary on the life and times of Moms Mabley and I was surprised to find out that she was a lesbian. For anyone who doesn't know who she is, she's extremely worth researching because you've no idea how many doors this woman opened in American culture. Though I knew that her funny costumes of mismatched Salvation Army attire was clearly part of her stage persona, I didn't know that for her, that look, that dress, was her "drag" persona. Her real-life presence and presentation was this: And then I read this ridiculous article today concerning an imbecilic Mississippi group that is vocally pissed off that a number of businesses in the state of Mississippi are rallying to display store-front stickers indicating that tho the new law taking effect on July 1st in that state gives businesses the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people based on religious objection, they are businesses that choose not to exercise that right because they feel it's wrong to do this. So... People who say "We won't discriminate; we want your business" are being accused of discriminating against people who do want to discriminate. And I think back to Moms Mabley and how she cleverly altered first black society as a black woman on the vaudevillian stage and then all of society all the way up and through the 70's where she continued to cheekily and oh-so-cleverly comment on the truth of race relations in the U.S. People of every kind have built and shaped this country I live in. Why was I sold such a huge lie through my childhood and formative years that only one kind of person was responsible? And then add to this the Big Blue Marble lie that was sold in the 60's and 70's of "globalism", that we're all the same under the skin. Total misdirection. A smoke and mirrors move to distract me from my realization that I was being discounted by telling me, "No, man, you're not discounted because I am you and you are me and we are all in this together, so the fact that you don't see your face anywhere or see two men holding hands anywhere doesn't matter because I represent you even though I don't." What a fucking gigantic lie. Why are we denied our place in history? Why is a pretense made that gays and lesbians haven't been a huge part of the creation of our culture, as huge a part as any other kind of person? America the Beautiful was written by Katherine Lee Bates. One of our most cherished songs describing our nation, a song that wells pride in the bosom of all patriots was written by a lesbian. Why was I allowed to know of this only in the last few years? Why? Why couldn't I know that someone who was this important in American culture was like me? Why was I not allowed to build a sense of self respect and self acceptance on this knowledge when I was young? How many other Americans of importance, people who truly had a hand in shaping our culture, were LGBT people, and when will I be allowed to know about it? When will it be safe to know that we're here and we matter and we have mattered since the first boat touched land from the Old World to the New World? When will the masters of this knowledge give it to us, plainly and fully? I watched that documentary about Moms Mabley last night and though I was so intrigued and fascinated to learn about such an interesting and ground-breaking person, there was a small, juvenile, jealous part of my soul that felt - and continues to feel - ripped off that I come to know these things only now in my 44th year of life, not when I was a child when it might have shaped me differently and made me feel more assured and complete in the grand play about to unfold before me.
Though this is really being posted for future reference and as a reminder to myself of my own accountability, members are absolutely free to comment. I invite it. The recent need to remove a member from the writingforums.org community gave me pause to think about the fact that everyone sees a forum differently. Everyone has their own reason for seeking such a venue, the use they wish to give to it, the input they wish to provide, the output they hope to gain and the mode of interaction in which they intend to engage. In the same manner, mods don't all mod the same way. There are power hungry mods, mother-hen mods, absentee mods, all kinds of mods. I am (or try to be) an Accountant Mod. I try to boil it down to math as best I can. My hope is that in doing so, I neither show favoritism nor undue prejudice, given that I too am just a person, like everyone else. Fallible. I think of the forum as an investment portfolio. All of the members, myself included, are individual investments. Since we do not pick our membership, but instead it picks us, it is to be considered a high risk portfolio. Anyone who knows investments knows that a high risk portfolio carries the greatest risk of loss, but also the greatest chance for high yield or ROI (Return On Investment). The investments fall into a few categories: The huge, vast majority of the forum members are all cost-free. They come to the forum, they use it for its purpose and they cost nothing at all to maintain. Nothing. They don't even know who the mods are because they genuinely have no reason to. There are some few members, who are cost-free, the return on whom is an embarrassment of riches. Would that I could clone them! There are some few members who do have an appreciable cost, but their return is still greater, their ROI is in the green, so they still represent good investments. There are some members who cost more than they return. Even when the return is high, or very high, if the cost is greater, if the ROI is in the red, the investment represents a loss. And there are some very few members who only represent cost and have no return at all. Trolls, spambots, blog-spammers, etc. That's why it's not always so cut and dry for mods. We have to balance a person's right to express their opinion with how much of a dick they make of themselves in the expression of that opinion. We have to balance how much value a person brings with how much kerfuffle they cause. We have to balance the fact that some people are preciously sensitive hothouse flowers and others are weatherbeaten merchant marines who eat wood and shit charcoal. We have to balance the fact that some people know only how to speak in Snark and others don't grok its keen edge at all. We have to take into account that some people just want to feel out where the boundaries are and some people just want to poke at that boundary for enjoyment's sake. I take all those things into account. And if you ever wonder why we don't immediately silence conversation concerning someone who was just banned (which some find inappropriate), imagine that the ban was unfair (we're human, we have our moments of passion) and it was you who had been banned. Would you not want others to be able to argue for your reprieve? And lets say the ban was fair, but still questionable, would you not want the right to call for some accountability or explanation as a remaining member? Would you really want a situation where bannings were un-talk-about-able, unquestionable, taboo territory?
I'm just picking a thought out of my mind the way you would pick something from between your teeth that's bugging you and nothing else exists in the universe until you get it out and then can move on with your day. Post your threads wherever you want, I'll just move them, but seriously there are other subforums besides General Writing. Would that I had the power to do so, I would close that subforum on high-traffic days in order to get folks to formulate their questions just a hair more precisely so that they fit into one of the other subforums in the upper quarter that I call The Teachers' Lounge. Maybe it's a technology thing and lots of folks enter the forum via their phones and that's the very first sub-forum they see so, yeah, here, super easy... I love the upper area of the forum. I wish it were used more in ways that were discouraged in the past, but which I embrace fully, insouciantly and with reckless rockoutwithyourcockout abandon. Brainstorming! But I do wish folks thought about their question for like 10 seconds more before posting so as to hone them down, get to the root, avoid misunderstanding and get better answers. Sunday, April 20, 2014, 9:52 am (Atlantic Seaboard, N.A.) General Writing - 8,566 threads Character Development - 2,049 Plot Development - 2663 Setting development - 404 (Are you kidding me??) Word Mechanics - 1,981 Research - 837 The Art of Critique - 274 I have a feeling that if I had a reeeeaaalllyyyy bored day and went back through all the General Writing forum threads and moved them to where they should be back to Day #1 of the forum, those numbers would be a good deal more evenly distributed.
You suck at a tectonic level. You suck the fossils of dinosaurs clean out of their variegated rock strata. You suck raw petroleum out of its veins. You suck so hard that were your sucking power to be pointed into the sky you would perturb the orbit of the gas giant planets. Your sucking would leave its mark on the oort cloud. You work in none of my transcription/translation programs. Handbrake and even Avidemux sneer at your inability to convert into other formats. I try everything and either you convert with no audio or your audio is this heinous, high, jack-hammer drdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdrdr.... I am forced now to transcribe these "video" files sans transcription pedal. Would that I were Tyler Durden, you would be Angel Face...
"The sky is falling!!" "What?" "The sky is falling, man. Seriously." "Weren't you here last year right about this time saying the same thing?" "Yeah, man! Thanks for remembering me. But seriously, the sky is falling." "Was it falling last year too?" "Yep." "And the year before that?" "Yep." "How many years can I keep going back before your answer becomes no." "Um... Pretty much to the dawn of language, I think." "That's what I thought." "So are you going to get ready for the falling of the sky?" "I think I'm ok. I've got other stuff to do." "Aw, come on, dude. You're gonna' get me fired! I haven't mongered panic in a single person today." "I'm not surprised. You gave up the ghost pretty quick there. You can't really tell people what you're saying is bullshit and expect them to still get scared." "Yeah, I know. But everyone else is doing the really hard-sell, and I hate the hard-sell, you know. Like when you go look at new cars and the greasy guys with the bad toupees jump on you. Nobody likes that." "Yeah, that's true. I do hate that." "Yeah, me too! So I thought I would try a different approach and kinda' soft-shoe the whole thing, not be so intimidating." "Well, you keep trying man. Best of luck." "So you're not scared at all about the sky?" "The sky is a layer of gas that because of the high nitrogen content causes light filtering through it to be tinted blue. It's not like a thing that can fall on you, so... no." "It's a metaphor, man!" "Yeah, I know that. I wasn't sure you did, though." "You're funny, dude. Socialists are going to take over this country." "No, they're not." "They are, man. Then the abortion clinics are going to start popping up like Seven Elevens." "Yeah, I don't see it happening." "Look around you man. The end days are here." "Actually they're not, bro. Shit is always happening. Has always been happening. Always will be happening. There's nothing special about the times we live in." "But Obamacare, man!" "Oh, for fuck's sake..." "You must be one of those lib-dems." "Actually, I'm pretty moderate. Right in the middle on most issues." "You gotta' pick a side, man!" "No, actually I don't gotta' anything." "You do!" "I'm pretty sure I don't. I think I would have gotten an email or something." "I bet you're for gun control." "I own a gun, bro. And I'm trained to use it. The only control I think should happen is that people should have to take a class on the use and care of guns before getting to buy one. You know, kinda' how we make people prove they can drive a car before we give them a driver's license." "Dude, you're what's wrong with America. You want to control everything and let the government into your living room, and let gays get married, and..." "Yeah, buh-bye." He walks away to the other corner of the street hoping the light will change by the time he gets there so he can cross and continue on with his day. The don't walk is still flashing on the other corner and he waits. A thin young woman approaches him. "Hey, guy. I'm with a marriage equality group. Are you for marriage equality?" "Actually, yeah, I am. My best friend is gay and I was his best man when he got married." "Awesome, that is so cool. Also, you know, meat is totally murder. You don't eat meat, do you?" "Oh, fuck me. Maybe the sky should fall."
When you work as an interpreter, you live in a flipped world of grammatical person. Whatever your interlocutors say is repeated by you, in the target language, in the first person, as though you were the actual person who originated the statement. This is done for the sake of maintaining accuracy of what was said. What they say, you say. You never say things like, "What he said was...." No. Bad interpreter. So that means the first person is nixed as an option whenever you, the interpreter, need to step out from your cloak of invisibility for a moment (it happens, there are reasons) and need to say something as you yourself. In those cases, you must refer to yourself in a strangely servile third person mode. "The Interpreter understood the statement to be the following..." That's you, making a statement about what you understood. Flipped.